In the 1970s, a vaccination, or immunization, push by world health authorities and workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eradicated smallpox from the human population. Similar pushes in recent years have attempted to eliminate polio and yellow fever, but they have been unsuccessful due to cultural issues and fears in undeveloped regions. A new movement in the United States questions the need for vaccines, due to questions about both their safety and necessity. This lack of coverage is leading to outbreaks of diseases long thought eradicated from the developed world, particularly whooping cough and measles.
What Do Vaccines Do?
Vaccines are a method of artificial immunity.
Natural immunity occurs when an individual is exposed to a pathogen. The body’s immune system mounts a response that involves an array of first and second responder cells. Some immune cells engulf and process the pathogen, exposing pathogen proteins to other immune cells. These cells then produce antibody proteins specific to the pathogen, which is then attacked and eliminated from the body.
Artificial immunity via vaccine is the introduction of pathogen proteins into the body to mount a pre-emptive immune response. This response is targeted to produce an immunological memory against the pathogen, resulting in the prevention or minimization of disease should the individual be infected with or exposed to the pathogen naturally.
Why are Childhood Vaccinations Still Being Done?
Despite popular belief, only smallpox has ever been eradicated. All other diseases are possible, particularly in today’s age of air travel. As long as a disease is still present somewhere in the world, the need for protection is there, even in North America.
Despite suppression by vaccination in prior decades, Measles outbreaks began to occur again in the United States in 1990 due to a lack of vaccination among children purposefully left unvaccinated or because there was lack of public health measures and health care to ensure they received the vaccination. In recent weeks, measles outbreaks have also occurred in the UK and New Zealand. Whooping cough (pertussis) is also now more common in the United States. This disease once ravaged the lungs of children but was suppressed by vaccination.
Vaccines require wide coverage to prevent disease. Because no vaccine is 100% effective (usually approximately 95% coverage, sometimes requiring boosters or multiple vaccinations depending on the particular vaccine), nearly everyone needs to be vaccinated to achieve the estimated 85% coverage required to keep a disease at bay.
Vaccination for Travel
Many places in the world have endemic disease unknown to most in the U.S. and Canada. It is necessary to vaccinate against these diseases when one plans to travel to locales where they are common. Yellow fever is one such disease. For example: If a person from the U.S. were to travel without vaccination and become infected with yellow fever, they could then bring the disease back to North America, a population susceptible to infection because of no consistent vaccine program for that particular disease. There would then be a risk of a yellow fever epidemic, which has occurred in the U.S. previously and to which there are memorials like the one in Savannah, Georgia (see photos below).
There are health care measures in place to prevent such a spread and resulting epidemics, but vaccination is the easiest and most cost-efficient prevention measure. It is also the safest measure for individuals to take to protect themselves against the assortment of diseases that still leave many scarred, deformed, and dead.
Vaccination for High Risk Fields
Some vaccines are also necessary for those in certain fields, such as the hepatitis B vaccine for health care workers. The military also provides vaccines to protect the armed forces from biological weapons or the endemic diseases in regions where they may be stationed. These vaccines minimize the risk to the individuals in the particular fields, but they also prevent spread to the community at large should these individuals be exposed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a vaccination and immunization schedule for all ages.
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