Smallpox 1718. In 1721, Cotton Mather and colleagues provoked controversy in Boston by inoculating hundreds. In 1796, Edward Jenner, a doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, rural England, discovered that immunity to smallpox could be produced by inoculating a person with material from a cowpox lesion. Cowpox is a poxvirus in the same family as variola. Jenner called the material used for inoculation vaccine, from the root word "vacca", which is Latin for cow. The procedure was much safer than variolation, and did not involve a risk of smallpox transmission. Vaccination to prevent smallpox was soon practiced all over the world. During the
Vaccination policy immunity against it. This protects those unable to get the vaccine due to medical conditions, such as immune disorders. Vaccine-preventable diseases remain the most common cause of childhood mortality with an estimated three million deaths each year. Each year, vaccination prevents between two and three million deaths worldwide, across all age groups, from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles. With some vaccines, a goal of vaccination policies is to eradicate the disease – make it disappear from Earth altogether. The World Health Organization coordinated the effort to eradicate smallpox globally through vaccination, the last naturally occurring case of smallpox was in