Things you need to know about vaccines
What is Vaccine?
Vaccines are like a training course for the immune system. They prepare the body to fight disease without exposing it to disease symptoms.
How Vaccination works?
Weakened or dead disease bacteria introduced to patients, often by injection.
White blood cells triggered to produce antibodies to fight the disease
If patients encounters disease later, antibodies neutralize the invading cells
How was vaccination discovered?
Before vaccines existed, the world was a far more dangerous place, with millions dying each year to now preventable illnesses.
The Chinese were the first to discover an early form of vaccination in the 10th Century.
Eight centuries later, British doctor Edward Jenner noticed how milkmaids caught mild cowpox, but rarely went on to contract the deadly smallpox.
In 1796 Jenner carried out an experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps.
The doctor inserted pus from a cowpox wound into the boy, who soon developed symptoms.
Once Phipps had recovered, Jenner inserted smallpox into the boy but he remained healthy. The cowpox had made him immune.
In 1798, the results were published and the word vaccine - from the Latin 'vacca' for cow - was coined.