To Prevent Diseases:Vaccination

By the 1850s, the diseases smallpox, diptheria, tetanus, tuberculosis and polimyelitis had claimed millions of victims,especially babies and young people. Today, vaccination has dramatically reduced deaths caused by these and many more diseases.
Vaccination is a method which enables the human body to develop the defence necessary to combat the microbes(germs) which cause the infection and stop it developing. The first vaccine was developed in 1796 by the English doctor Edward Jenner. He observed that if cowmen caught bovine smallpox, this made them immune to the type of smallpox which affected humans. Therefore, he took a little of the pus from a spot caused by bovine smallpox and put this on the scratched skin of a small boy, James Phipps. The experiment was a success. The boy got just one spot and then, when he came into contact with smallpox victims, he did not catch the disease. Finally, one of the most dangerous diseases could be beaten.
Nearly two centuries later, in 1980, the WHO(the World Health Organization) declared that smallpox had been almost eradicated throughout the world! Jenner's vaccine had pened up the way to a new era of medicine which enabled the prevention of many fatal diseases and saved millions of lives. Vaccine against smallpox was followed by vaccines against rabies, tetanus, diptheria, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis and, in more recent times, measles, whooping cough and hepatitus B. To have some idea of how efficient vaccines are, it is worth noting that there was a combined total of 55,000 diptheria victims in England and France in 1940, when the vaccine became compulsory. By 1956, the number of cases had been reduced to only 51.