Facts of the Matter – Vaccines

 

 

Small pox hands. Marcus Zilliox.
[Native American, B.1972]

In 1796, Edward Jenner, a doctor from Berkeley, England, performed the world’s first vaccination. A milkmaid claimed she was immune to smallpox because she already had contracted cowpox. Jenner tested her assertions by using fluid from the milkmaid’s cowpox lesion to inoculate eight-year-old James Phipps over a series of days. It worked. Today, there are 120 vaccines available to prevent deadly diseases.

• Before Jenner’s vaccination work, smallpox killed an estimated 500 million people. Because of a World Health Organization vaccination campaign that began during the 1960s, the last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in 1977.
• A century ago, 2 out of every 10 children born in the United States died before the age of five, in large part because of infectious diseases such as the measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, and polio.
• The most prolific vaccine developer of the past century was Maurice Hilleman, a microbiologist who was behind 8 of the 14 vaccines used regularly today, including those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and influenza. Although he never gained the recognition of Jenner or polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, Hilleman’s measles vaccine alone prevents an estimated one million deaths worldwide every year.
• Just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans annually. In 1952, Salk, head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, developed the polio vaccine, which led to an 80 percent drop in the number of polio cases in the United States between 1955 and 1957.
• Since 1985, Rotary’s PolioPlus program has engaged more than a million volunteers to help protect more than two billion children from polio in 122 countries. There are now fewer than 2,000 polio cases a year.
• The immunization rate for all diseases around the world is at a record level, with 106 million infants vaccinated in 2008. Newborn babies are naturally immune to many diseases because of antibodies they receive from their mothers, but that immunity lasts only about a month to a year.
• Suspicions about vaccines date back to the beginning of Jenner’s work. The U.S. State of Massachusetts passed the first mandatory vaccination law in 1809. Today, opposition comes from parents who believe vaccines lead to autism and other neurological problems in children. Studies since the 1990s have failed to establish a link.
• Researchers estimate that vaccines prevent 2.5 million child deaths annually. But a funding gap of US$1 billion leaves 24 million impoverished children at risk for preventable diseases. WHO estimates that if 90 percent of the world’s children under age five received the vaccines that are common in wealthy nations, another two million deaths a year could be prevented by 2015.