The historic program successfully eliminated the disease in North America, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Taiwan, much of the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of northern Africa, the northern region of Australia, and a large swath of the South Pacific, and dramatically reduced mortality in Sri Lanka and India.
As recently as two centuries ago, around 1 in 2 children died before reaching the end of puberty. Our ancestors were often largely powerless against poverty, famine, and disease, and these calamities were especially devastating for children. Since then, child mortality has plummeted across the world. This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a style of traditional medicine based on more than 2,500 years of Chinese medical practice that includes various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage (tui na), exercise (qigong), and dietary therapy.
Streptomycin is now on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. The World Health Organization classifies it as critically important for human medicine.
In collaboration with thoracic surgeon Gustaf Lindskog, the two doctors from Yale School of Medicine injected the chemical mustine into a patient with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In a monumental moment for the field of medicine, the patient, a Polish immigrant to Connecticut known in literature only as JD, experienced a dramatic reduction in his tumor masses, paving the way for millions of future patients who would benefit from the therapy in the years and decades to come.
Florey’s discoveries, along with the discoveries of Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chain, are estimated to have saved over 200 million lives, and he is consequently regarded by the Australian scientific and medical community as one of its greatest figures.
The discovery of penicillin, one of the world’s first antibiotics, marks a true turning point in human history when doctors finally had a tool that could completely cure their patients of deadly infectious diseases.
Within a year, people suffering from diabetes were being treated with insulin for a disease that had been considered fatal.
He traveled to Hong Kong in 1894 at the request of the Japanese government during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and identified a bacterium that he concluded was causing the disease.
Pasteurization, invented by Louis Pasteur in 1864, kills harmful bacteria that tend to grow in dairy products, especially in the absence of refrigeration. At the time, the discovery was rather revolutionary; it allowed milk to be consumed less immediately and prevented many illnesses.
