Who’s to blame? Some complicated answers…
Ever since vaccination was introduced at the end of the eighteenth century by Edward Jenner, the immunization of children in particular has been a source of controversy that has stirred the deepest passions. Mankind accepted therapeutic blood-letting for two thousand years with hardly a murmur of scepticism; but vaccination against smallpox, especially when the state made it compulsory, gave rise to one of the longest-lived social protest movements in British and American history.
Nothing is easier to forget or take for granted than the progress we have made. A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine points out that from the early 1940s to 1973 the annual incidence of whooping cough in the United States was reduced by immunization from 157 per 100,000 of the population to less than 1 per 100,000. Whooping cough is not a trivial disease: the present death rate from it world-wide is now one in 164 cases, and is higher among infants. Before immunization, several thousand people died annually in the United States from whooping cough; by the 1980s, less than 50 a year died. Continue reading

August 22, 2009
March 24, 2009