Will Brittany be the first region to be deconfined?
The reopening of restaurant terraces, theaters and cinemas could begin in mid-May in this region, the most spared by the epidemic.
The executive indeed advocates a territorialized approach, as Olivier Véran indicated to Le Télégramme, a Breton newspaper anchored in Finistère ... a choice which is undoubtedly not due to chance.
If Brittany is on pole this time, it was not always so. During the winter of 1954-1955, the region was even stigmatized because of a worrying smallpox attack, which mainly focused on the city of Vannes (Morbihan).
“The heroes are the most modest, those whose life can be summed up in two words: conscience and sacrifice.
"Doctor Grosse is dead, and the weekly Samedi Soir echoes the emotion of the Breton people.
At 43, this young doctor with slicked back hair devoted the last days of his life to fighting the nascent smallpox epidemic in Vannes, at the beginning of 1955. Infected himself and "exhausted by overwork. more than ten days ”, as a friend confided, he died on January 24.
To the braves the grateful homeland: three days later, he was posthumously made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the President of the Council, Pierre Mendès-France.
Doctor Guy Grosse died fighting the epidemic.
Guy Grosse was therefore "a victim of his duty", in the words chosen by the Fourth Republic to pay him homage. Morbihan's chief health inspector was on a family vacation in Nantes when the phone rang on New Year's Day. At the end of the line, he was informed that his colleague Georges Cadoret was urgently trying to reach him. Less than a month earlier, this pediatrician was called to the bedside of a boy just over 1 year old. A simple chickenpox could not explain his feverish state, Dr. Cadoret had him hospitalized. He himself is bedridden over the Christmas holidays - a simple flu, he thinks. On his return to the service, he identified six new cases similar to that of little Daniel Debuigny. "There is smallpox in the air," he said in his diary.
The virus brought back from Indochina
Outbreaks of this disease, which causes fever and pustules, are regularly detected in Asia.
However, it seems to have disappeared in France.
There was indeed an episode in Marseille in 1952, but not many people in Brittany did not care.
This time, it was "brought there by a returnee from Indochina", headlines L'Oise Matin.
The vector of contagion is the father of little Daniel, soldier and yet vaccinated.
A culprit is designated, without proof: three silk pajamas brought back in the soldier's suitcases, and on which the virus could have found refuge.
On the front page of the newspaper Radar, little Daniel Debuigny, patient zero for smallpox, and his father.
MOUNIC Delphine
Confirmation falls on January 3.
After having analyzed under an electron microscope the samples that Dr. Grosse had sent them by train immediately after arriving in Vannes, the service of Professor Lépine of the Institut Pasteur in Paris certifies the origin of the disease.
“Smallpox Alert,” headlines Radar magazine.
Little Daniel's haggard face, half-open mouth and round eyes, spreads out on the front page of the weekly with his father's inset.
The specter of one of the worst plagues in history, this virus that was once nicknamed "smallpox" (between 50,000 and 80,000 deaths per year in France in the 18th century), resurfaces.
22,000 inhabitants of Vannes vaccinated in three days
Immediately, the fight begins. On January 5, the prefect of the Morbihan department made vaccination compulsory. The vials stored in pharmacies are requisitioned, others are sent from Paris, Tours and Montpellier. 22,000 inhabitants of Vannes were "stung" in three days and very quickly more than 200,000 throughout the department, despite the alerts of the "Disciples of Christ of Montfave" and those of the "National League against vaccinations". A wind of concern, fed by word of mouth, is blowing like a west wind as far as Ile-de-France, where hundreds of thousands of inhabitants are also inoculated.
At that time, not many people were worried about the adverse effects and the gazettes mainly reported on the new victims of the epidemic.
From January 6 to 18, hardly a day goes by without the Vannes hospital welcoming one or more patients.
Seventy-four in total will be listed there and 24 others in Brest.
A girl dies on January 3, 19 other victims will follow.
Read alsoThe cow and the vaccinated: the amazing story of the doctor who beat smallpox
These "contagious" are quarantined and the rest of the population largely self-isolates.
The turnover of the Vannes traders collapsed by 80%.
Churches, cinemas, cafes, had nevertheless remained open in order to "not suspend all life in Vannes", had justified the prefect.
The bay of Quiberon is worried about the repercussions on tourist activity for Easter.
“Plague-stricken” caregivers
"France is afraid" and a poster at Dax station (Landes) brandishes the danger of death for any passenger wishing to go to Vannes. At the beginning of February, Paris Match made sensationalism by evoking "the terror in front of the coffins arriving at the station [...] of a besieged city of news circulating at the speed of bush fires". On site, caregivers and their families become plague victims. We avoid the street where lives the well-respected doctor Amphoux, in charge of "pavilion 10" of the hospital where the contagious are parked. Doctors intrigued by this resurgence are arriving from all over Europe.
It takes between ten and fifteen days after the express vaccination campaign to resume health control. The epidemic recedes from January 19 and ends in May. Little Daniel, patient zero in France, survived. "It seems I was the one who brought smallpox to Brittany!" »His father was surprised, at the origin of the last panic of this kind in France. It was not until 1980 that the World Health Organization declared smallpox officially eradicated from the planet.