In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was only 35 years old. Time flies. Today, New China has been established for 73 years, and there have been earth-shaking changes. According to the latest data from the National Health Commission, the average life expectancy in my country has increased to 78.2. age!
From the age of 35 to the age of 78.2, it has gone through hardships, but it is also full of glory. After the founding of New China, infectious diseases raged, and many people died of infectious diseases. Life.
1. Smallpox: a stubborn disease that has been raging for thousands of years, completely eliminated in 11 years
Smallpox used to be one of the most terrifying infectious diseases in the world, a type of pox virus infection, once infected, there is almost no cure . From the 16th to the 18th century, the number of people who died of smallpox every year was several million, and after the 18th century, the number of people who died from smallpox in Europe alone reached more than 150 million.
Smallpox has been prevalent in the world for 3,000 years, and in 1961, China announced the complete end of the epidemic of smallpox in China , relying on vaccines.
In 1950, the government called for the vaccination of smallpox. Due to the limited conditions at that time, it could only rely on bovine body culture to obtain raw materials. The process was very complicated and expensive. The raw material for the production of vaccinia is five-year-old female cattle. The cattle need to come to Beijing from the prairie thousands of miles away and go through a 60-day quarantine before they can be used for production.
At the beginning of production, the technician needs to send the cattle to take a bath. When taking a bath, they need to slowly wash 7-8 times with high-grade soap and warm water without any ambiguity. The preparation of the vaccine after that is even more physical work, and it takes 4 men to complete only shaving. The subsequent vaccination, nursing and other processes required 30 manpower. Five days after inoculation, it is time to harvest the vaccine, and about 100,000 people can use it from a single cow .
After that, researchers in my country continued to develop new vaccines and promote vaccination nationwide. From the early 1950s to the early 1960s, my country conducted three compulsory vaccinations and secondary vaccinations, and a total of 1.8 billion doses of vaccines were distributed to more than 500 million people.
In June 1961, Hu Xiaofa, the last smallpox patient in my country, was cured and discharged.
2. Polio: A sugar pill saves three generations of Chinese
Polio, scientifically known as polio , mostly occurs in children under the age of 7, and there is no cure for the disease. The disease is a type of recessive inheritance. The symptoms at the initial stage are the same as those of a cold, but once the outbreak occurs, the child's limbs may be immobilized overnight, and it may be life-threatening at any time.
In 1955, polio swept across China, paralyzing 1,680 people in Nantong, Jiangsu, and killing 466 people overnight. After Nantong, similar cases occurred in many places across the country. No one in China at that time knew what polio was, and no one knew that the disease was incurable.
At that time, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed vaccines, but under the shadow of the Cold War at that time, the United States was reluctant to share technology with my country. The relationship between my country and the Soviet Union is also at a freezing point. Naturally, technology sharing cannot be obtained, or there may be reservations. To obtain vaccines, we can only rely on independent research and development by Chinese people.
In March 1960, Gu Fangzhou and others successfully tried the live polio vaccine . They did not hesitate to test the medicine with their own bodies and children. They were worried that the children would not drink it. They even made sugar pills. Grandpa Maru".
After the last case of polio was discovered in Xiangyang, Hubei in 1994, there were no more cases of polio caused by native wild virus in my country, and the disease was eliminated in our country! It was not until 2016 that the sugar pill officially withdrew from the stage of the national immunization program because of the availability of more advanced vaccines.
