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The most common type of smallpox, ordinary, historically has devastated populations with a 30% death rate. The smallpox virus is transmittable through bodily fluids and materials contaminated with infected materials. Generally, face-to-face contact is required for an individual to contract smallpox as a result of an interaction with another human.
A British sailor disembarking HMS Seahorse brought smallpox to Boston. 5759 people were infected and 844 died. 1736: Pennsylvania: 1738: South Carolina: 1770s: West Coast of North America: 1770s Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic At least 30% (tens of thousands) of the Northwestern Native Americans die from smallpox. [39] [40] 1781–1783 ...
The epidemic was probably spread to the Cherokee by white traders in the summer of 1739. The virus may also have come from Spanish Florida. 900 Cherokees had joined the British to fight the Spanish in Florida in 1739, and may have brought smallpox back with them. Cherokee "religious physicians" blamed the plague on "adulterous intercourse ...
Onesimus (late 1600s–1700s [1]) was an African (likely Akan) man who was instrumental in the mitigation of smallpox in Boston, Massachusetts.. He introduced his enslaver, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather, to the principle and procedure of the variolation method of inoculation, which prevented smallpox and laid the foundation for the development of vaccines.
The 1520s smallpox epidemic spread from Mesoamerica into adjacent maize-growing regions in North America.A population decline in the Columbia Basin, evidenced archaeologically by a sharp regional decline in artifacts and structures in the early 1500s, has been tentatively linked to a spread of this outbreak, but greatly predates any written record in the region.
Other communities decimated by smallpox in the 1730s include the Lower Loup, Pawnee of Nebraska, Cherokee, and Kansa. [2] In 1796, English physician Edward Jenner discovered that infecting a person with the comparatively mild cowpox infection could provide immunity to smallpox, and thus invented the world's first vaccine.
The Massachusetts smallpox epidemic or colonial epidemic was a smallpox outbreak that hit Massachusetts in 1633. [1] Smallpox outbreaks were not confined to 1633 however, and occurred nearly every ten years. [2] Smallpox was caused by two different types of variola viruses: variola major and variola minor. [3]
During the 1770s, smallpox killed at least 30% (tens of thousands) of the Northwestern Native Americans. [74] [75] The smallpox epidemic of 1780–1782 brought devastation and drastic depopulation among the Plains Indians. [76] By 1832, the federal government of the United States established a smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans. [77]