Tomorrow Thursday at 6 p.m., Casa Asia and Casa de América, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, CSIC and Editorial Planeta, will hold a round table discussion on The Balmis expedition: the first model of global fight against pandemics. In November, a second conference will be held at Casa Asia focusing on the arrival in the Philippines.
On 30 November 1803, the corvette María Pita set sail from the port of A Coruña. On board the ship were more than 50 people, including crew, medical staff and 22 orphaned children carriers, who were inoculated two by two every week to keep the fluid fresh and to be able to take the smallpox vaccine to America and the Philippines. It was the beginning of the first worldwide health campaign. The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition was active for almost nine years, vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people on its round-the-world journey and laying the foundations for the first public health systems.
Led by the doctor Francisco Xavier Balmis (in the illustration), the expedition included the doctor Josep Salvany, and Isabel Zendal, considered by the World Health Organisation to be the first nurse on an international mission in history, in charge of caring for the children, and rector of the Inclusa in A Coruña. One of the 22 children, aged 9, was Isabel’s own son. There were only a few years left before the independence of the Spanish territories in America when this expedition was organised, which was enthusiastically praised by the discoverer of the vaccine himself, Edward Jenner. Registration at this link.
