The Role of Smallpox
Vaccination in Mortality Decline in the Great Britain through Eradicating the
Disease between XVIII-XX centuries - Facts or a Political Arithmetick? " P>
Mamurjon Rahimov p>
University of
Illinois at Chicago p>
Department of
Economics p>
"Whoever would understand the political
phenomenon known as 'The Anti-Vaccination Agitation "- and its magnitude would
seem to indicate it as being at least worth understanding - must remember some
one or two facts, facts obvious enough indeed, but constantly forgotten. And chief amongst them this, that every
opponent of the practice, every skeptic, without exception, as to its benefits,
has in the first instance approached the question in a spirit at least of impartiality,
and probably all his prejudices strongly in its favor " p>
Alfred
Milnes p>
Introduction h2>
In October of 1979,
The World Health Organization (WHO), officially declared smallpox, also known
as variola, eradicated. The disease
that was known to mankind as early as 1122 BC in China, took millions of lives
throughout the world (Britannica.com).
We all know that WHO is a branch of the United Nations Organization, and
is dedicated to protect the health of the mankind. However, UN also has many other branches dealing with issues like
business, economy, culture, education, migration, to name a few, and
furthermore, the eradication of smallpox is believed to be a collaborative
achievement of most of these branches, both on local and on global level. If so, this eradication must have been
announced jointly with, if not all, then at least few other UN branches such as
World Bank, UNDP, and UNICEF. It would
be very unfair for medical men to appropriate this great achievement of mankind
all to themselves. Although medical men
do not like to mention it too much, they all recognize that eradication of
smallpox was not only their merit. p>
Economic history has
contributed significantly to the formulation of various economic theories. Among the economists who have found history
to be an important source for their ideas one can cite Adam Smith, Thomas
Malthus, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Robert Solow,
and Gary Becker. For economists it is
very important to study population history in order to come up with policies
that decrease mortality and morbidity of the population. Factors like life expectancy, infant
mortality are considered to be key indicators of progress in any country. Longer life expectancy means more manpower
to move the industry, larger consumer base for products and services. p>
My purpose here is to
elaborate in theoretical and statistical plausibility of smallpox vaccination
eradicating the disease based on papers written about the smallpox disease, and
to seek whether the vaccination, if efficient at all, weighed substantially in
the light of other forces that caused decline in mortality. It is quite striking to read from Memoirs of
Jacques Casanova, a contemporary, that "More people perish at the hands of
doctors than are cured by them "in those centuries, and in contrast the common
belief that in those centuries medical men suddenly came up with
"One-size-fits-all" cure for one of the most dreadful diseases of all time,
which, with little modifications, if any, continued to be administered
worldwide up until the second half of the XX century. p>
For several centuries
until now, proponents of vaccination hailed smallpox vaccination to be a proven
wonder weapon in the hands of mankind in eradicating the disease in the world,
although there have been a number of schools of thought that, if not disprove,
then diminish the role of smallpox vaccination in fighting the disease to an
insignificant level, which is the change in the virulence of smallpox. p>
We must remember from
European history that the period in which the most drastic decline in British
smallpox mortality took place coincides with the time Britain experienced
industrial revolution, and thus improved standards of living must have played
crucial role in reducing susceptibility of the population towards infectious
diseases (Krause, 1958). A good example is a paper written by several
researchers from the University of Liverpool and Manchester that used
time-series analysis to study the dynamics of smallpox in Britain in 1550-1800,
and found a striking correlation between wheat price fluctuations and epidemics
(Duncan, 1993; also see Helleiner, 1957).
p>
Economists almost
always try to use models in order to come up with logical interpretations of
current and past events. One such paper
(Mokyr, 1993) that tries to explain decline in mortality in the light of
economic forces, used standard theory
of utility maximization as a starting point: Uj = Uj (Xij ... Xnj, Lj) where
L is composite family life expectancy variable, subject to the usual budget
constraint