Hundreds of years ago, Chinese medical practitioners and traditional healers crushed up scabs from people infected with smallpox and encouraged healthy people to sniff them. The people who insufflated the scabs were effectively infected with small doses of the smallpox virus, to which the human body would develop defenses against. Those who sniffed the smallpox scabs were less likely to get infected with smallpox than their counterparts. Although rudimentary, this served as the first known human use of vaccines.
In the late 1800s, a scientist named Louis Pasteur created injectible vaccines for anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera. First tested in chickens, the vaccines helped animals stay free of getting infected with the likes of cholera, tuberculosis, and anthrax, each of which could easily prove deadly.
Today, vaccines exist for hundreds of common ailments. Thanks to vaccines, some sicknesses have all but gone extinct in the developed world.
Although the benefits of vaccines have been documented extensively over the past century, some modern parents refuse to have their children vaccinated, citing beliefs that vaccines are linked to autism and other health issues.
As expected, outbreaks of diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella have become more common in developed nations in recent years as a direct result of thousands of parents failing to get their children vaccinated due to their beliefs that going without vaccines is better than biting the bullet and getting them.
Just yesterday, on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce held a meeting in which one of the main topics was outbreaks of measles, mumps, and rubella caused directly by people failing to get children vaccinated.
The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases’ Dr. Anthony Fauci was present at that House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s meeting yesterday, at which he made clear that the United States government hasn’t taken appropriate measures against misinformation related to vaccines, particularly measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines.
In the first two months of 2019, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 159 cases of measles have been reported across 10 states, ranging from Washington to New York to Georgia. Nearly all of the aforementioned infections of measles this year have manifested in children that have not been vaccinated with the common measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
This is alarming because measles had been deemed eradicated here in the United States just 19 years ago.
