When a cattle breeder named Benjamin Jesty supposedly found himself immune to smallpox after having contracted cowpox from his own cows, he decided to inoculate his entire family with cowpox lesions. This was in 1774. Such a procedure was well known to the populace, since the practice of inoculation with the actual smallpox virus had been popular in England since the 1740s, with often deadly results. Twenty years after Jesty and others experimented on themselves with cowpox inoculations, Edward Jenner, a notorious self-promoter, went a step further. He inoculated a child with cowpox and then injected the child with a deadly dose of smallpox. Luckily, the child did not die. This experiment led Jenner to publicize his theory of vaccination in 1796, which quickly became an accepted, and required, practice without any scientific experimentation or medical studies to prove the vaccine's effectiveness.

Despite the initial widespread popularity of vaccination, no one actually proved that the cowpox vaccine prevented smallpox, and many critics insisted that the vaccine did not work. Physicians were especially skeptical about the ability of cowpox to prevent smallpox

In fact the new cowpox vaccination often did transfer other contagious and deadly diseases to recipients, especially syphilis, leprosy, and tuberculosis.

According to the chief pulmonologist at the hospital in Lviv (Western Ukraine, NDT), Dr. Rudnitskaya, who suffered from pneumonia related to influenza A H1N1 may develop chronic lung disease, as the bronchial asthma, because it seems that the disease has caused irreversible organic changes in their lungs. Doctors, however, seem to be still struggling to explain how the phenomenon occurs.

"We're just beginning to study these patients, and we follow them closely, asking them to do regular blood tests and urine. The disease has caused irreversible changes in their lungs, "said the physician assistant department head of research infectious Andrusishin doctor, hospital, Ivano-Frankivsk (Western Ukraine, NDT). "They have great difficulty recovering from their weakened immune system, and there is a high risk they incur all sorts of other infections. Many children who are yet cured of the flu continue to have a temperature of 40 °. We also have three people in intensive care with an influenza syndrome meta-type "meningo-encephalitis (inflammation of the cerebral cortex, NDT). Members of our staff, who were hit by the virus, now suffering from myocarditis. "