What a wonderful Woman’s Day surprise! We are here to make sure you know the women who helped lay the foundations for modern immunization. Come, let us introduce you to five exceptional women who pushed forward the frontiers of science.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
She challenged convention by proposing smallpox immunization into Western medicine. While she was visiting the Ottoman Empire, she studied Turkish customs and observed inoculation against smallpox.
Lady Mary
She was keen to save her kids from smallpox’s suffering, so in 1718 she had her almost five-year-old son Edward vaccinated.
On her return to London, she promoted this procedure, notwithstanding resistance from the medicinal establishment.
Drs Pearl Kendrick & Grace Eldering
They worked together on a limited budget to develop the vaccine against whooping cough. Moreover, they ran a successful clinical trial, resulting in the first vaccine against the disease introduced in America in the 1940s.
Following the development of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine, the fusion of it with two other vaccines (tetanus and diphtheria) into a single vaccine is now known universally as “DTP.” It is part of the vaccination schedule in India.
Dr Margaret Pittman
Her work led to the HIB vaccine, which aids in preventing meningitis & Pneumonia. Among her many accomplishments, she is recognized for her analysis of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium.
She classified six serotypes of Haemophilus influenzae, which she specified “a” through “f”. Serotype b (Hib) is the most destructive, causing meningitis and other severe infections.
Dr Isabel Morgan – The only one woman in the 17-person “Polio Walk of Fame.”
During the 1940s, Morgan operated with a team of virologists at Johns Hopkins University in the USA. As a result, elevating polioviruses’ understanding. She and her team were the first to prove that an inactive or “killed” virus could produce immunity in monkeys. Certainly overturning the previous belief that only live viruses could create polio immunity.
Dr Anne Szarewski
In the 1990s, Dr Anne Szarewski and her associates noted that human papillomavirus (HPV) connects to cervical cancer. In addition, over the ten years that followed, a breakthrough allowed a vaccine to be developed to prevent HPV and, with it, the majority of cervical cancers. Those vaccines are becoming more and more available worldwide, preventing suffering and death and even offering up the possibility of eliminating cervical cancer.
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