Because our long, solitary nature walks aren’t ending anytime soon, BIO’s Cornelia Poku points us to a fascinating podcast on the history of vaccines—and the important role of cows, then and now.
The concept of “immunity” has been around since as early as 430 B.C.E. Greece, where historian Thucydides discovered that people who had recovered from the plague were able to attend to people sick with it, begins the NPR Planet Money podcast episode.
Then, in the Middle Ages, experimenters in China had the idea to “manufacture immunity” by scraping off pieces of smallpox scabs, grinding them to a powder, and blowing the powder up people’s noses. (Ew.)
And it worked—kind of. Severe infections dropped, and the method spread around the world.
Fast forward to late-1700s England, where milkmaids noticed they (and the cows) were developing spots that looked similar to smallpox but didn’t hurt or kill either the cows or the humans. Coincidentally, the milkmaids did not get smallpox.
An English physician decided to formalize the exposure process, which he called “variola vaccina,” for the Latin word for cow, vacca—and the rest is history.
Now, in in the midst of another pandemic, cows are yet again playing a role in the race to find a vaccine. As we’ve reported, BIO member SAB Biotherapeutics is also using cows to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 by using the animals to produce human antibodies.
The vaccine origin story reminds us of the importance of One Health policies—researching the links between human, animal, and environmental health to solve our most pressing challenges, including our worst pandemics.
Learn more about One Health.
