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Abstract
Smallpox, which currently is only of historical interest, was once one of the most terrible illnesses with high mortality and morbidity. In the late 18th century, the English physician and naturalist, Edward Jenner (1749 - 1823), discovered an efficient preventive technique against smallpox which he termed "vaccination". Afterwards, the practice of vaccination gradually became widespread when finally in 1979, the World Health Organization formally declared the global eradication of this fatal disease.
Presented here is a brief account of smallpox eradication in Iran which started on a limited scale in the 19th century by the order of Abbas Mirza (1789 - 1833), the Crown Prince of Fath Ali Shah Qajar (reign from 1797 - 1834), and reinforced in 1848 by Mirza Taghi Khan Amir Kabir (1807 - 1852) the Prime Minster of Naser ad-Din Shah, and became more popular after the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Tehran in 1921, where considerable doses of smallpox vaccine were produced. In addition, in subsequent years, a law that mandated public smallpox vaccination was passed by the Iranian parliament (Majles) in 1953 and eventually, the mass vaccination program led to the complete eradication of smallpox in Iran in 1978.
Keywords: Iran * smallpox * vaccination
Introduction
Smallpox was a fatal contagious viral disease called by some authors as "the most terrible of the ministers of death".1 It was a major cause of morbidity that included deep pitted skin scars and blindness. Historically, smallpox dates to the prehistoric era, i.e. 3000 to 6000 years ago.2 In the Middle East and Iran it was a common disease from ancient times.3 The origin of smallpox was uncertain, but it has been postulated that it originated from Africa and then spread to India by Egyptian merchants.1 The mortality and morbidly rate of smallpox was high, especially in children, and it has been estimated that at the end of eighteenth century in Europe smallpox annually killed 400,000 people and was responsible for more than one-third of all cases of blindness.4 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mortality of smallpox remained high. For example, in an outbreak in Montréal-Canada in 1885, 3000 people died of smallpox.5
The worldwide smallpox campaign
Smallpox has been known as a dreaded disease since antiquity....