Episode 3: Hope and Fear
At the end of the 18th century an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, developed the world’s first vaccine -for smallpox .His breakthrough was the first of several
over the next hundred years as scientists , microbiologists and chemists such as Louis Pasteur, and epidemiologists such as John Snow sought answers to and developed cures for diseases such as cholera., rabies and typhoid.
The end of World War One saw the return of Pandemics with the outbreak of the deadly Spanish Flu.
Quarantine measures were first widely introduced and debated 700 years ago and now in the 21st Century with Covid-19, their effectiveness is being debated again.
Science, which searched for and found cures and vaccines to old diseases, is once again on a quest for a new one as the world seeks solutions to a crisis that threatens its very way of life.