The history of smallpox in Mexico spans approximately 430 years from the arrival of the Spanish to the official eradication in 1951. It was brought to what is now Mexico by the Spanish, then spread to the center of Mexico, where it became a significant factor in the fall of Tenochtitlan. During the colonial period, there were major epidemic outbreaks which led to the implementation of sanitary and preventive policy. The introduction of smallpox vaccination in New Spain by Francisco Javier de Balmis and the work of Ignacio Bartolache reduced the mortality and morbidity of the disease.
Smallpox was an unknown disease not only in 16th century Mexico, but in all the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans. People in the Americas had not yet been exposed to the type of diseases that plagued the East, which meant that they had no resistance or immunity against them. It was introduced to Mexican lands by the Spanish and played a significant role in the downfall of the Aztec Empire. Hernán Cortés departed from Cuba and arrived in Mexico in 1519, sent to start trade relations only on the Veracruz Coast. However, he disobeyed the Cuban governor and began to invade the mainland. The governor sent Pánfilo de Narváez after Cortés. Narvaez's forces had at least one active case of smallpox, and when the Narvaez expedition stopped at Cozumel and Veracruz in 1520, the disease gained a foothold in the region. [1]
The introduction of smallpox among the Aztecs has been attributed to an African slave (by the name of Francisco Eguía, according to one account) but this has been disputed. From May to September, smallpox spread slowly to Tepeaca and Tlaxcala, and to Tenochtitlán by the fall of 1520. At this time, Cortes was returning to conquer the city after being thrown out on the Noche Triste. [2]
Cortes names only one indigenous leader who died of smallpox, Maxixcatzin. However, Cuitláhuac and other native rulers also died of smallpox. Chimalpahin reports the death of some lords in Chalco from the disease as well. These deaths were part of a widespread epidemic which decimated the common population. Estimates of mortality range from one-quarter to one-half of the population of central Mexico. [3] Toribio Motolinia, a Spanish monk that witnessed this epidemic, said: “It became such a great pestilence among them throughout the land that in most provinces more than half the population died; in others the proportion was less. They died in heaps, like bedbugs.” [1]
It had been estimated that the population of Mexico fell from over thirty million people before the arrival of Hernan Cortez to 1.5–3 million by 1568. Although the numbers are uncertain, it is estimated that smallpox killed forty to fifty million people in the New World. Regardless of the exact numbers, it is certain that the conquest of the Aztec Empire was greatly influenced by the arrival of the smallpox virus. [4]
Mexico's native population was one of the first to experience a smallpox epidemic, where many succumbed to the disease. In 1520, the first wave of smallpox killed 5-8 million people. From 1545 to 1576, up to 17 million people died from smallpox. This large amount of deaths in the second wave are thought to be the result of hemorrhagic fevers. [5] An article recounts in Spanish texts, "The pestilence of measles and smallpox was so severe and cruel that more than one-fourth of the Indian people in all the land died--and this loss had the effect of hastening the end of the fighting because there died a great quantity of men and warriors and many lords and captains and valiant men against whom we would have had to fight and deal with as enemies, and miraculously Our Lord killed them and removed them from before us." [6] Although the native people of Mexico had no previous contact with smallpox, these Spanish texts showed that the Spanish population was familiar with the disease and the mortality that resulted from it.
During the colonial period, smallpox remained a scourge, especially on the indigenous population. There was a major epidemic between 1790 and 1791 that started in Valley of Mexico, [7] principally affecting children. [8] More people recovered than died. In Mexico City, of 5400 cases admitted to the hospital, 4431 recovered and 1,331 died. This epidemic coincided with the rise of prices of corn and a typhus epidemic, which caused a slight demographic decrease in central Mexico. [8]
The spread of smallpox throughout Mexico followed the communication and trade routes throughout the country. Starting in Peru and traveling to Guatemala, the disease arrived in Tehuantepec and settled there before slowly moving north to Oaxaca, Tehuacan, and eventually reaching Mexico City. [9] The president of Guatemala warned the viceroy in a letter from May 3, 1789, that a ship from Peru had arrived in its Southern coast. Aboard the ship were the daughters of The Regent of the Royal Audencia Don Ambrosio Cerda. Two of the daughters had suffered from smallpox on the voyage and still had fresh scars when they reached the port. [9] By 1798, the epidemic had reached Saltillo and Zacatecas. [10] This outbreak is notable because that was the first time that sanitary and preventive campaigns were implemented in New Spain, such as quarantines, inoculation, isolation and the closing of roads. [8] However, these measures did not always work correctly. In Oaxaca, some of the citizens refused to follow the local officials orders. Miguel Flara, who was sent from Tehuantepec to help in Oaxaca, wrote in a letter from June 1797 that “the people [Oaxacan residents] are a terrible people who will submit to no treatment whatsoever”. [9] Residents even went as far as attempting assassinations of some local officials. Closing of roads also showed problems in some of the country's towns because residents would slip through them against local official's orders. The residents needed to get to their crops, livestock, and the market in order to keep their economy afloat. [9]
Different institutions provided health and public services to fight against the smallpox epidemic: the most important were The “Ayuntamiento” or city council. The Catholic Church and "Real Tribunal del Protomedicato", which was an institution founded in 1630, managed all sanitary aspects of New Spain including the establishment of quarantines. [11] Charity boards were created, where rich people of the city donated money to build hospitals and to help and cure the sick. This charity board was led by the Spanish archbishop Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta. [10] The interest of rich people to help the poor was not purely philanthropic, as the death of those sectors caused economic problems because indigenous population was not able to pay tribute or work. [8]
The Church-managed hospitals and cemeteries forced people to bury dead people with lime at the outside of cities. [8] The isolation of sick people in hospitals or charities at the outsides of the cities was another important measure to stop the smallpox infection. These institutions took care of patients and provided them food and medicine. During the 1797 and 1798 outbreak, they also provided inoculation and were called inoculation houses. Although inoculation was practiced, the miasma theory of disease was still believed. [8]
In 1796, Gaceta de México published an article in which the use of inoculation was promoted, giving examples of kings and important persons who underwent the procedure. [12] In January 1798, the eradication of the 1790s epidemic was declared. The government proposed that the measures taken in that epidemic be implemented as the official policy in the case of a new epidemic, and it was approved by city council in April 1799. Viceroy Miguel José de Azanza, ordered an article written on 14 November 1799 about the benefits resulting from the inoculation in the 1790s epidemic and distributed to the population. [8]
In 1803, Spanish doctor Francisco Javier Balmis started a vaccination program against smallpox in New Spain, better known as Balmis Expedition, which reduced the severity and mortality in the epidemics that followed. [13] Before Balmis, Dr José María Arboleyda started a vaccination campaign in 1801 but this was not successful. [8]
There was another important outbreak in 1814 which started in Veracruz and extended to Mexico City, Tlaxcala and Hidalgo. This epidemic caused Viceroy Félix Calleja to take preventive measures like fumigations and vaccination, which were successful. [14]
There were sporadic outbreaks until 1826 when smallpox appeared in Yucatán, Tabasco and Veracruz brought by North American ships. In 1828, there were reported cases in Hidalgo, Oaxaca, State of Mexico, Guerrero, Chiapas, Chihuahua and Mexico City. [8] [13]
Efforts to eradicate smallpox in Mexico started when José Ignacio Bartolache wrote a book in 1779 about smallpox treatment called Instrucción que puede servir para que se cure a los enfermos de las viruelas epidemicas que ahora se padecen en México (Instructions that may help to cure smallpox in Mexico) in which he included an introduction describing the disease and instructions to treat it, such as drinking warm water with salt and honey, gargling with water and vinegar, keep tidy and clean and finish treatment by taking a purgative. He thought that smallpox was a remedy of nature to clear bad mood and doctors should not accelerate the process of healing because it was against nature. [15] He wrote a letter to propose his measures as a strategy to combat smallpox in which he also included recommendations like purifying the air with gunpowder and scents, ventilating churches where bodies were buried, and building cemeteries outside the city. [16] This strategy was approved by City Council in September 1779. [17]
The next phase of eradication started in 1803 when Francisco Javier de Balmis started a vaccination campaign in New Spain. This has been considered one of the first vaccination campaigns of the world. [18] Francisco led the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine, which was also called the Balmis Expedition. Spanish King Charles IV authorized the vaccine to be brought from Spain into their other territories. [19] Twenty-two orphaned children were used in this expedition for arm-to-arm inoculation. [19] The expedition eventually departed from Cuba and landed in the port of Sisal of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula on June 25, 1804. [19] The crew continued to inoculate the citizens of Mexico over the next year. When the expedition finished in Mexico in 1805, they left from the port of Acapulco with 25 Mexican orphans with them to start more work in the Philippines. The previous 22 Spanish orphans who helped with inoculation stayed in Mexico under the supervision of the Bishop of Puebla. [20]
The Balmis Expedition crew were not the only people to bring the vaccine into Mexico during this time. The personal physician of Viceroy José de Iturrigaray, Dr. Alejandro Garcia de Arboleya, brought the vaccine to Veracruz in April 1804. [19] It reached Chihuahua in May of that year, which resulted in a vaccine campaign led by Nemesio de Salcedo, the General Commander of the Interior Provinces of New Spain. [19] The vaccine was then sent from Chihuahua to New Mexico and Texas, since this is prior to the Mexican–American War and they were still a part of Mexico's territory. [19] Mexico also had immunization boards that included members of the Catholic clergy. These board members would meet weekly to look over how the different regions of the country were doing and they kept records at local churches. [20]
Children Inoculation programs were introduced in a Mexican province called Guanajuato Mexico by Juan de Riaño in October 1797. Riaños goal was to institute a program that would allow him to inoculate the children of Guanajuato in attempts to save them from the deadly disease. Riaño aware that parents would not agree with the inoculation of their children. Riaño decided to use his own six children as examples and had them inoculated first in hopes that this act would encourage other parents to bring their children forward. The inoculation process held in Guanajuato consisted of a physician making deep scratched into the arms of the children and rubbing organic matter containing the live smallpox virus into the wounds. The results of this inoculation attempt resulted in immunity by artificially introducing a benign case of smallpox. Ultimately the point Juan de Riaño was trying to make was that the risk of dying from inoculation was far less than acquiring smallpox naturally. [21]
Eradication efforts were always present in Mexican history, but the 20th century showed a more successful plan for research, disease prevention, and vaccination. The Vaccination and Revaccination Act was instated in 1925, making it legally required for citizens to be vaccinated from smallpox and revaccinated every 5 years. This act was installed under the administration of General Plutarco Elías Calles. [22] During the 1920s, Mexico's government also published guidelines that federal and local governments had to follow regarding organizing revaccination programs, containing disease, reporting cases, and handling vaccines. These guidelines were all a part of the first Mexican Health Code. [22] These efforts continued into the 1930s, as health care workers in the country worked diligently to eliminate this disease. In 1935, a mobile crew was set up by the Federal Health Service to help. Medical professionals and volunteers lending their hands and effectively administered 6 million vaccine doses from 1935 to 1936. [22]
In the 1940s, there were a few setbacks. The institute that was manufacturing the vaccine, Mexico City's Hygiene Institute, was using glycerinated lymph. [22] This meant that the vaccine had to be refrigerated in a specific temperature or else it would no longer work. Mexico is home to various rural villages that did not have access to the type of refrigeration needed to hold the vaccines. It was very difficult to get the vaccine to the thousands of people living in smaller communities. [22] Despite the challenges, the vaccinators hard work resulted in over 28 million vaccines given from 1944 to 1949. [22] However, in 1943, the National Campaign to Combat Smallpox was created, with the slogan, "Coordination, Uniformity, and Generalization." This committee was an action taken towards eradicating smallpox in Mexico through campaigning through systematic and routine work regarding the vaccine. They mainly pursued smaller and rural communities that had been harder or had less resources to combat the disease. [23]
Smallpox was officially declared eradicated from Mexico in 1951.
Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae, the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
Vaccination is the administration of a vaccine to help the immune system develop immunity from a disease. Vaccines contain a microorganism or virus in a weakened, live or killed state, or proteins or toxins from the organism. In stimulating the body's adaptive immunity, they help prevent sickness from an infectious disease. When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, herd immunity results. Herd immunity protects those who may be immunocompromised and cannot get a vaccine because even a weakened version would harm them. The effectiveness of vaccination has been widely studied and verified. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases; widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of diseases such as polio and tetanus from much of the world. However, some diseases, such as measles outbreaks in America, have seen rising cases due to relatively low vaccination rates in the 2010s – attributed, in part, to vaccine hesitancy. According to the World Health Organization, vaccination prevents 3.5–5 million deaths per year.
Cowpox is an infectious disease caused by the cowpox virus (CPXV). It presents with large blisters in the skin, a fever and swollen glands, historically typically following contact with an infected cow, though in the last several decades more often from infected cats. The hands and face are most frequently affected and the spots are generally very painful.
The smallpox vaccine is the first vaccine to have been developed against a contagious disease. In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner demonstrated that an infection with the relatively mild cowpox virus conferred immunity against the deadly smallpox virus. Cowpox served as a natural vaccine until the modern smallpox vaccine emerged in the 20th century. From 1958 to 1977, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a global vaccination campaign that eradicated smallpox, making it the only human disease to be eradicated. Although routine smallpox vaccination is no longer performed on the general public, the vaccine is still being produced to guard against bioterrorism, biological warfare, and mpox.
José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa, 1st Marquess of Concordia, KOS, was a Spanish military officer and colonial administrator in America. From August 20, 1806, to July 7, 1816, he was viceroy of Peru, during the Spanish American wars of independence.
The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, commonly referred to as the Balmis Expedition, was a Spanish healthcare mission that lasted from 1803 to 1806, led by Dr Francisco Javier de Balmis, which vaccinated millions of inhabitants of Spanish America and Asia against smallpox. The vaccine was transported through children: orphaned boys who sailed with the expedition.
James Phipps was the first person given the experimental cowpox vaccine by Edward Jenner. Jenner knew of a local belief that dairy workers who had contracted a relatively mild infection called cowpox were immune to smallpox, and successfully tested his theory on the 8-years-old James Phipps on 17 May 1796.
Francisco Javier de Balmis was a Spanish physician best known for leading an 1803 expedition to Spanish America and the Philippines to vaccinate populations against smallpox. His expedition is considered the first international vaccination campaign in history and one of the most important events in the history of medicine. It inspired recent vaccination efforts such as that of Carlos Canseco, president of Rotary International, to start the worldwide program PolioPlus to eradicate polio.
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus, which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, making smallpox the only human disease to have been eradicated to date.
The 1974 smallpox epidemic in India infected 188,000 people, leading to the deaths of 31,000 Indians.
The history of smallpox extends into pre-history. Genetic evidence suggests that the smallpox virus emerged 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Prior to that, similar ancestral viruses circulated, but possibly only in other mammals, and possibly with different symptoms. Only a few written reports dating from about 500 AD to 1000 AD are considered reliable historical descriptions of smallpox, so understanding of the disease prior to that has relied on genetics and archaeology. However, during the 2nd millennium AD, especially starting in the 16th century, reliable written reports become more common. The earliest physical evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3,000 years ago. Smallpox has had a major impact on world history, not least because indigenous populations of regions where smallpox was non-native, such as the Americas and Australia, were rapidly and greatly reduced by smallpox during periods of initial foreign contact, which helped pave the way for conquest and colonization. During the 18th century the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease.
In 1767, the 11-year-old composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was struck by smallpox. Like all smallpox victims, he was at serious risk of dying, but he survived the disease. This article discusses smallpox as it existed in Mozart's time, the decision taken in 1764 by Mozart's father Leopold not to inoculate his children against the disease, the course of Mozart's illness, and the aftermath.
Variolation was the method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual, in the hope that a mild, but protective, infection would result. Only 1–2% of those variolated died from the intentional infection compared to 30% who contracted smallpox naturally. Variolation is no longer used today. It was replaced by the smallpox vaccine, a safer alternative. This in turn led to the development of the many vaccines now available against other diseases.
Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or other microbe or virus into a person or other organism. It is a method of artificially inducing immunity against various infectious diseases. The term "inoculation" is also used more generally to refer to intentionally depositing microbes into any growth medium, as into a Petri dish used to culture the microbe, or into food ingredients for making cultured foods such as yoghurt and fermented beverages such as beer and wine. This article is primarily about the use of inoculation for producing immunity against infection. Inoculation has been used to eradicate smallpox and to markedly reduce other infectious diseases such as polio. Although the terms "inoculation", "vaccination", and "immunization" are often used interchangeably, there are important differences. Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or microbe into a person or other recipient; vaccination is the act of implanting or giving someone a vaccine specifically; and immunization is the development of disease resistance that results from the immune system's response to a vaccine or natural infection.
Rafael María de Aguilar y Ponce de León was a Spanish military officer who served as the 56th Governor-General of the Philippines and was the longest serving governor in the Spanish Philippines.
Isabel Zendal Gómez was a Spanish nurse from Galicia who took part in the Balmis Expedition, which took smallpox vaccination to South America and Asia.
An epidemic of smallpox in 1856 on the west Pacific island of Guam, then under the control of Spain, resulted in the death of over half of the population, or about 4,500 people. The population collapse led Spanish authorities to transfer the population of Pago to Hagåtña, ending a settlement dating back before colonization. It also led the Governor of the Spanish Mariana Islands to encourage immigration to Guam.
In May 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) made an emergency announcement of the existence of a multi-country outbreak of mpox, a viral disease then commonly known as "monkeypox". The initial cluster of cases was found in the United Kingdom, where the first case was detected in London on 6 May 2022 in a patient with a recent travel history from Nigeria where the disease has been endemic. On 16 May, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) confirmed four new cases with no link to travel to a country where mpox is endemic. Subsequently, cases have been reported from many countries and regions. The outbreak marked the first time mpox had spread widely outside Central and West Africa. The disease had been circulating and evolving in human hosts over several years before the outbreak and was caused by the clade IIb variant of the virus.
An outbreak of smallpox occurred in the city of Wrocław in Poland in the summer of 1963. The disease was brought to Poland by an officer in the Ministry of Public Security who had returned from India. The epidemic lasted for two months, causing 99 people to fall ill and seven to die. It caused Wrocław to close and quarantine itself.
The 2022–2023 mpox outbreak in Colombia is a part of the outbreak of human mpox caused by the West African clade of the monkeypox virus. The outbreak reached Colombia on 23 June 2022.