RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Smallpox and its control in Canada
JF Canadian Medical Association Journal
JO CMAJ
FD Canadian Medical Association
SP 1543
OP 1547
VO 161
IS 12
A1 John W.R. McIntyre
A1 C. Stuart Houston
YR 1999
UL http://www.cmaj.ca/content/161/12/1543.abstract
AB Edward Jenner's first treatise in 1798 described how he used cowpox material to provide immunity to the related smallpox virus. He sent this treatise and some cowpox material to his classmate John Clinch in Trinity, Nfld., who gave the first smallpox vaccinations in North America. Dissemination of the new technique, despite violent criticism, was rapid throughout Europe and the United States. Within a few years of its discovery, vaccination was instrumental in controlling small-pox epidemics among aboriginal people at remote trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company. Arm-to-arm transfer at 8-day intervals was common through most of the 19th century. Vaccination and quarantine eliminated endemic smallpox throughout Canada by 1946. The last case, in Toronto in 1962, came from Brazil.