Editor:
Read you article this morning and have to agree with you that the development of the smallpox vaccine was one of the major accomplishments for human health … in fact, all the developers of our vaccines are really the unsung heroes of humanity (“When the Old World Met the New,” Aug. 26).
As you know from reading Doug Preston’s book, around 60 percent of of everyone on our expedition developed symptoms of a horrific disease called mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, for which there no real cure yet. Fortunately, most were treated (and some still are since 2015) by the NIH. The researchers there feel we were all infected (since it is spread by sand fly bites of which we all had many) but for some unknown reason, a number of us remain asymptomatic with absolutely no known ramifications. Others essentially have it for life with recurring flare-ups that have fortunately been reduced by their treatments. Why were some of us essentially immune and others not? Probably random genetic and/or immune histories of our predecessors.
In our present pandemic, it is good for people to think about all this and to be thankful for the development of vaccines.
Steve Elkins, Pasadena
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This article appears in The State of Covid-19.
There is a lot of outright lies out there in the world about past pandemics. One story is that Polio never existed. When I was young there were a lot of people young and old who staggered around with Forrest Gump style leg braces and every year or so a kid in my schools would end up in an iron lung and whether they survived or not we never knew, but we never saw them again. Another less terrible thing back then was goiters. It seemed to me when I was young that they afflicted mainly elderly women. We were told not to stare at them and got scoldings if we did so a lot of those people became invisible and suffered alone. When I used to stay with my Nana Wilda in a high rise old folks apartment building in Los Angeles there were old women aplenty with giant goiters who were Nana’s friends and they were just like regular people and when I got to know them the goiters became almost invisible instead of the old woman who bore it around. I have never heard of any widespread defiance or loss of freedom claimed by anyone when the US government mandated the simple cure be put into your foodstuffs. It is probably out there though and because I don’t believe there are as many actual conspiracies out there as some do, I do not look for these things. Tylenol is an open easy to research conspiracy in my opinion though. Why it is not prescription only makes zero sense to me.