Smallpox, Vaccination, and Oscillatory Epidemic Dynamics
Introduction
Smallpox was eradicated from the Earth in 1980 after an unprecedented global immunization effort. Its status as one of only two eradicated diseases (rinderpest is the other), is a testament to the massive mortalities that are attributed to the disease. With an estimated 12 millennia of torment, smallpox claimed the lives of 300-500 million in the 20th century alone.
Variolation and Vaccination
Even before the colonialization of the Americas, Smallpox cases spread across the continents of Europe and Asia. The Variola virus, which caused the disease, came in two strains: minor and major. Variola Major was the more prevalent of the strains, as well as the more lethal. 25% of persons infected by Variola Major would die from the disease. On the other hand, Variola Minor was a much less severe strain, and most folks that were infected by it would recover.
The Variola Virus
After several millennia of smallpox victims, folks started to notice that there was a difference between the Major and Minor Variola strains. Better yet, they noticed that similar to survivors of the Variola Major Strain, those that had been infected with Variola Minor never became infected by smallpox again. Still better, they realized that if they intentionally infected themselves with Variola Minor in the first place, they would dramatically decrease risk of dying from smallpox.
As you could imagine, this sort of changed everything
Dramatic recreation of the first mass variolation
Ok, cool. So whenever someone's child gets sick, you host a village sleepover so everyone's kid gets it, make a big pot of chicken soup, and let the wonders of natural selection slowly but surely eliminate the big bad Variola Major.
Well, if it was actually that easy, we probably would still all have polio and mumps.
Enter Edward Jenner
Similar to smallpox, there was cowpox. Jenner intuited that "infecting" people with cowpox may develop a similar immunity as those infected with Variola Minor, without all the fun of scabs and rashes. Being from a cow, or vaca as the Spaniards would say, Jenner's process was dubbed vaccination. Legend has it that vaccination was a valuable technique that worked seamlessly for centuries until a small faction of bored n'e'er-do-wells in the USA decided to slander the process and attribute to it false side effects. Their arrogance and ignorance would cost billions in funding to quarantine and cure victims that otherwise would have been shielded from the disease...
But anyways
He deserved better than this shit...
Oscillatory Dynamics of Smallpox Epidemics
Well if you haven't run off to reddit for advice on how to convince your spouse to hold off on vaccinating your children, then I assume this next section will drive you to tears of boredom.
Yet in the name of knowledge, I shall persist!
So it turns out that people didn't die steadily over time from the imminent threat of smallpox. Oh no, that would be far too simple...
This nifty little chart of deaths per year by smallpox in Sweden looks pretty similar to any other chart of deaths per year by smallpox from any other place in the world. That is to say, wherever smallpox struck, it struck in fixed time intervals. Decades of modern research has been done on centuries of historical data, so I will try to summarize it in brief. Wherever smallpox would hit, it would come every 3-7 years (fixed intervals that would vary by region). A lot of different folks have tried to model the oscillations, but no published work has been able to create a concise model that doesn't involve a forcing term (myself, a classmate and, a physics professor made a simple dynamic model that we think is pretty great. Maybe it will make it into a future post). Different theories attribute the oscillations to different factors, some intrinsic and others regionally-specific.
This ones for the "All Lives Matters" Folks
If you've even looked at the graph, my god I hope that you have, you'll notice that at some point, it became mandatory to vaccinate (I guess they were more afraid of a long, painful death than developmental disorders??). At this point, we see the magnitude of the deaths vastly decrease, yet the oscillations still remain. And you bet your dingus that this same phenomenon happened everywhere else, too.
Those pesky oscillations!
Why do I even care
Why should anyone study a dead disease and bother to care about the curvy waves that the data makes???
Well, smallpox was the first disease to be eradicated... and we might want to say "eradicated" because its sort of hard to say that every little microscopic Variola virus on Planet Earth is now dismembered.
Also, there are lots of diseases that have oscillatory epidemics. Understanding the math behind these epidemics can actually help control them on a large scale.
Who knows, maybe someday we can all eradicate a disease of our own! Until then...
Smallpox Girl
Variola Picture
Mud Party
Jenner
Chart
Cartoon
Meme
#steemstem-competition2
I just read an article on the Huffington Post about live samples that were accidentally left in a lab from the 1950's had live samples in 2014. Scary stuff.
Right! We are one broken test tube away from a nice little plague... They ran a simulated test in the US government in the mid-2000s as part of a bioterrorism training program. Terrible response times.
One of the hardest parts about smallpox is that there are not huge stockpiles of vaccine sitting around. If it was to breakout, we would be fighting against time trying to produce and regulate all of the necessary vaccine.
I have recorded your post in our voting spreadsheet. Thank you for your submission @kzollove!
Thanks for hosting! Will multiple submissions by the same author be considered? @justtryme90
No, we are only accepting one submission per author.
The intention behind that was for people to submit their best work. However this project is a work in progress, so the rules are subject to change with each contest as we figure out how to best serve the community. (Meaning, for the next contest steemstem-contest3, we may change that rule depending on how things work out this time!)
I should probably focus on submitting some actual homework assignments anyway lol
School work, should always take precedence over blogging ;)
Ok ya... just let me convince may professors to accept my papers via Steemit submissions. Maybe we can generate some extra cash for lab work?
I'm confused. Why are vaccines necessary if Smallpox has been 'eradicated'?
Good Q. The meme I posted was totally a joke. World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that countries stop vaccinating for smallpox in 1980 when they declared the disease eradicated. Since we are using "eradicated" in quotes, and because so many intelligent folks have written on the subject, it is super important to consider the time and monetary cost of creating new supplies of vaccination in case of a future smallpox breakout . If smallpox was ever to be reintroduced to the population, the effects would be undoubtedly devastating, even considering improved quarantine strategies. Quite simply, it has been nearly 40 years since natural selection has been weeding out potential smallpox victims. When smallpox interacted without interference from modern medicine, it took lives of approximately 25% of the folks it infected. This % stayed constant when vaccines were administered, but the number of susceptible folks dramatically decreased. If the disease were to be released accidentally or by means of bioterrorism, the world would be woefully ill-prepared and the initial ratios of cases to deaths would be much higher than 4:1.
If I were a risk analyst, I assume that my calculations would agree with WHO recommendation: it is not worth vaccinating for an eradicated disease in order to prevent possibilities of a future epidemic. For diseases that are still cry much not eradicated (all of the rest!) it is super important that everyone vaccinate the way their doctor recommends. Vaccines only work if the whole population is using them correctly. One person's child getting sick because they didn't have the vaccination will cause many others who did vaccinate to also get sick. This is colloquially known as "Herd Immunity"
Thanks for the question. Hope this long-winded tangential answer was helpful.
"One person's child getting sick because they didn't have the vaccination will cause many others who did vaccinate to also get sick."
What's the purpose of getting vaccinated if the vaccine literally only "works" if no one has the disease? Why would someone who is vaccinated contract the disease in the first place since..ya know..they're vaccinated and all? Doesn't this mean the vaccine doesn't actually work? Herd immunity is totally bogus by the way. Although I certainly admire the notion that human beings should have their health managed from top-down exactly like livestock. That alone should signal that those..concerned..with such things place a high value on human life...
I think I totally agree with you on one thing: that individual's health should not be diagnosed generically. You're totally right, every person has different health needs and webmd does not have the correct answer for why both of our chests may be hurting, for instance. While I think there is a lot that could be improved in the process of vetting for medical school applicants, I fully believe that trained DOs, MDs, NPs, and PAs have the best insight on how each individual person should deal with most common ailments.
I do not profess to be vaccinologist. What I do know about vaccines, in essence has already been highlighted in this post. To go a little deeper, I will say that the theory behind vaccination is that your body will develop immunity to diseases that it encounters. Vaccination uses a damaged, or in the case of smallpox (at least originally), a similar virus to "trick" the body into creating a natural defense against disease.
Why might this not work? Try this terrible metaphor out for size: Imagine a large group of people as a wall into a country. If part of there is a hole in the wall, invaders can get in. Once those invaders get in, they can change their mechanism of attack in the future and then get in though weaker parts of the wall as well as holes. The more places that invaders get in, the better their strategy becomes in the future. This is a very simplified way of explaining how bacterial and viral diseases can adapt to "natural" defenses in larger organisms.
Its amazing how much I think you and I (on paper, or maybe in theory) see eye-to-eye. I once wrote a paper called "Medicated Reality" on how we choose to live a prescribed, cookie-cutter life. Of course, that being said, we could pick our favorite medications of which we would err on the side. I would stand up for vaccines, which fundamentally fail unless administered to a population. I'm not sure what you imbibe or otherwise ingest but the Russell quote works on that level as well, I'm sure. While mathematicians and philosophers provide us with interesting thinking points, I believe there logic only offers a starting point from where the scientific process can begin.
it decreases the chance of you getting sick by a huge amount..... it is unable to completely stop the spread of it
This isn't correct. Maybe you meant this:
Models behind the threshold at which herd immunity is acquired are bogus: they don't take into account the social structure of the contacts and treat us exactly like a herd put altogether into the same space — which is of course false. This means simply that the threshold to herd immunity is in fact lower. Nonetheless there's a lot of buzz about it and the “fake” threshold is used as reference to set the standard for vax-campaigns — and of course to say that if it isn't sufficiently high, the culprits are the antivaxers.
As I see it now, the problem is as usual that the number of people who don't accept impositions they have the right to doubt about, oscillates… There are periods with more flocks and periods with more wolves. The human kind won't be eradicated by none of those — virii and bacteria included! Sometimes I believe that the solution to a problem (epidemics) is damaging the human kind. Biological evolution doesn't count victims: it happens in the right direction, or it doesn't happen at all. 25% could have been the price for natural selection and biological evolution. Nowadays humans trust technological and scientific evolution more.
Thanks a lot for your participation!
My pleasure. I hope to talk more about the basic facets of epidemiology mathematics that I have learned over the past year.
Awesome post. Thank you so much! I hope that Polio will be next. We are already pretty close (http://polioeradication.org/).
That is wild... Hopefully polio. A friend's dad who was crippled for life by polio (vaccine didn't work for him) just recently passed. It is amazing to think that after only gaining a basic understanding of disease a little over a century ago, we are starting to alter our future in such a way.
Now we need to figure out how to reduce our carbon footprint, love our neighbors, and prepare for more and more people on this planet. Thanks for the reply and the support!
First of all; sorry to read about your friend's dad.
You really are an optimist, indeed. "Now we need to figure out how to reduce our carbon footprint, love our neighbors, and prepare for more and more people on this planet." -> I guess eradicating polio is much easier than any of those points. ;-)
I guess it would also be a good idea to start by putting less people in this world. More people always means more trouble...
"putting less people in the world"
Which brings us to the hardest problem of all... lol
Indeed. ;-D