History of smallpox

Smallpox was a very deadly disease that used to make people sick with bumps and rashes all over their bodies. Long, long ago, nobody knew how to stop this disease, so it kept spreading from person to person. It was so contagious that even if you just hugged someone who had it, you could get sick, too!

But then, in the 1790s, a man named Edward Jenner discovered he could protect people from smallpox by giving them a tiny bit of cowpox (a less dangerous virus that made cows sick). This protected humans from getting sick with smallpox.

Then, over 100 years later, in the 1960s, a group of people came together and decided to try to wipe smallpox off the face of the earth. They gave people a special vaccine to make them immune to smallpox, and they went around the world giving it to as many people as possible. This was really hard work, but finally, in 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox was gone forever! This was a really big deal because it was the first time in history that a human disease had ever been wiped out like this.

Nowadays, nobody gets smallpox anymore, and people don't have to worry about getting really sick from it. Scientists and doctors learned a lot from studying smallpox, and they used this knowledge to develop vaccines that protect against lots of other diseases, too!