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The History of Vaccines: A Glance Behind and a Look Ahead
A pediatrician evaluates the past and future of kids' inoculations
Modern medicine has done much for our children. Take a look at how far we've come with immunizations and preview what's just around the corner.
As parents, we want happy, long, and healthy lives for our kids, and today's children are more likely than ever to avoid life-threatening illnesses as they benefit from one of modern medicine's greatest developments—vaccinations.
In 1900, the life expectancy in America was 48 years, while today it is approximately 77 years. Improved nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene account for some of this remarkable achievement, as does a better understanding of diseases and the ability to take a pre-emptive strike against them with vaccines.
Most American children today have never seen anyone with the likes of polio or measles or diphtheria, the big killers of their great-grandparents' generation. Just how dramatically has the landscape changed since our ancestors were born? Take a primer in vaccination history and learn why we owe our forbearers a debt of gratitude for being part of the vaccine campaigns that have changed history.
The Vaccination Record
One hundred years ago, 40 percent of all deaths were due to 11 diseases—influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, typhoid, polio, and scarlet fever, as well as diseases causing diarrhea. And in the 1920s, before the diphtheria vaccine came along, 150,000 Americans each year caught this disease and 15,000 died. In 2002, only one case of diphtheria was reported in the United States. Just one.
A polio epidemic in 1916 paralyzed 27,000 people and left 6,000 dead. The first March of Dimes, in 1938, was a national request to the people of America to send one dime to the White House to be used in the fight against polio. President Franklin Roosevelt, himself a polio victim, saw the White House collect 230,000 dimes in just the first week (and Roosevelt remains on the dime to this day)! A polio vaccine was introduced in the mid-1950s, and within a few decades, wild-type polio was nearly wiped out. The few cases per year that did occur were related to the live virus vaccine, which prompted a switch to the killed version in the 1990s.
Measles (whose name probably derives from the Latin word for "miserable") still kills one million people each year worldwide. But the vaccine introduced in this country in 1963 has made it rare in the US.
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