Produced by Eleven Lab and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
When I was taking German at university at the beginning of this century, I encountered a word that seemed foreign even when translated into English. diphtheriaor diphtheria. “What is diphtheria?” I wondered, as I had never met a single soul afflicted with this disease.
Diphtheria was once known as “.strangling angel” was a major child murderer until the early 20th century. Bacterial infections destroy the lining of the throat, forming the throat lining. dead, leathery tissue it may cause death by suffocation. This disease was not left alone in every corner of society, and diphtheria died. queen victoria’s daughterand their children President Lincoln, President Garfield, President Cleveland. An elderly Ottawa woman whose parents often talked about their first and second families. I rememberedDiphtheria spread and all the children died.
Today, diphtheria has been completely forgotten and people like me were born. 60 years After the invention of the diphtheria vaccine, people may have no idea of the horror it once caused. If you’ve encountered diphtheria outside of a historical context, it’s probably because of scrutiny of your childhood immunization schedule. This is the “D” in DTaP vaccine.
Advances in vaccines over the past two centuries have cumulatively made the modern world a far more conducive place to be born. Most of human history, half of everything children He died before reaching the age of 15. That number has fallen to just 4% worldwide and is much lower in developed countries where vaccines are widely available. One of the main factors behind the increase in life expectancy. Stanley Plotkin, a 92-year-old vaccine scientist, said: “When I was a child, I had several infections that almost killed me.” He checked three boxes: whooping cough, influenza, and pneumococcal pneumonia. All of these diseases are routinely immunized against by children today.
However, the success of vaccines has also made it possible for modern humans to lose memory about the level of human suffering in the past. In a world far removed from the ravages of polio and measles, the risks of vaccines, whether imagined, real, or subtle, may loom much larger in the minds of parents. There is a gender. This is the space used by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s leading anti-vaccination activists and the current nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. It’s a stunning reversal of fortune for a man who was relegated to the fringes of the Democratic Party just last year. And it’s a reversal for Donald Trump, who has led a record-breaking race to develop a coronavirus vaccine even as he has flirted with anti-vaccine rhetoric in the past. Kennedy promised that We have no intention of pulling the vaccine off the market.but his nomination normalizes and emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. The current danger is that diseases limited to the past become diseases of the future.
Walt Orenstein trained as a pediatrician in the 1970s and frequently treated children with meningitis, a dangerous infection of the membranes around the brain. Meningitis can be caused by a bacteria called. Haemophilus influenzae Type b or Hib. (Despite the name, it’s not related to the influenza virus.) To diagnose the disease, “I remember doing multiple spinal taps,” he told me. The advent of the Hib vaccine in the 1980s virtually wiped out these infections. Currently, infants are routinely vaccinated within the first 15 months of life. “It’s amazing that there are people today who call themselves pediatricians who have never seen a case of Hib,” he says. He also remembers rotavirus. Half of hospitalizations due to diarrhea “People were saying, ‘Don’t go to the infant hospital during diarrhea season,'” Orenstein told me. but, 2000sthe introduction of rotavirus vaccine for infants under 6 months of age has significantly reduced hospitalizations.
For Orenstein, it’s important that the current rotavirus vaccine proves effective; safety. The old rotavirus vaccine removed from the market In 1999, regulators learned that babies had up to a 1 in 10,000 chance of developing a serious but usually treatable intestinal obstruction called intussusception. Approximately 1 in 50 infants infected with rotavirus will require hospitalization, so there is no question that the benefits still outweigh the risks, but the bar for vaccine safety is high in the United States. Similarly, the United States has switched from oral polio vaccines that contain live attenuated virus. 1 in 2.4 million chance From those that cause paralysis to more expensive but safer shots using inactivated viruses that can’t cause disease. No vaccine is perfect, says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist and president of the Atria Academy of Sciences and Medicine. severe tinnitus After receiving the new coronavirus vaccine. “There’s always a risk,” he tells me, acknowledging the need to be upfront about it. But he said the vaccine recommendation was based on the “overwhelming” benefits compared to the risks.
The success of childhood vaccinations has the pernicious effect of obscuring the benefits of these vaccines. Let’s put it this way. Even if everyone around me has been vaccinated against diphtheria and I haven’t, the chances of me getting diphtheria are virtually zero. I just don’t have anyone to give it to me. This protection is called “herd immunity” or “Community protection” But that logic crumbles as vaccination rates decline and the bubble of protective immunity bursts. The impact will not be immediate. “If we stop vaccinating people today, we won’t have an outbreak tomorrow,” Orenstein said. But over time, a largely forgotten disease can find a foothold again and make people sick who choose not to get vaccinated, as well as those who couldn’t get vaccinated. people with certain medical conditions And newborns are too young to be given injections. Taken together, an individual’s decision to refuse a vaccine will have far-reaching consequences.
Evolutionary biologists argue that plague and plague occurred at the same time. human civilization. Before humans built cities, when humans still lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, a new virus (from bats, for example) could tear apart the population and reach a dead end when everyone developed immunity or died. be. If there is no one else to infect, such a virus will burn out on its own. It wasn’t until humans started congregating in big cities that certain viruses could find new people to infect (babies without immunity, new immigrants, people with weakened immune systems) and smoldered indefinitely. Ta. Infectious diseases can be said to be a necessary condition for living in society.
But human ingenuity has given us a cheat code. Vaccines have allowed us to enjoy the benefits of humanity while preventing the constant exchange of deadly pathogens. And through the power of herd immunity, vaccines can protect even people who are too young or too sick to be effectively vaccinated. Our decision to vaccinate or not affects the lives of others. Vaccines make us responsible for more than just ourselves. And isn’t that what it means to live in society?
