Harriet Hall, MD, also known as “The SkepDoc,” is a retired family physician, a CSI fellow, and an editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog. Her website is www.skepdoc.info.
Vaccines are unquestionably one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. Smallpox deadliest scourge in human responsible for 300 million to 500 million deaths in the twentieth century alone, when it was already on its way out. Thanks to vaccines, smallpox has been completely eradicated. And now polio is well on its way to eradication. Today it occurs in only three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria (except for a recent isolated case reported in Papua New Guinea).
How quickly we forget! Only some of us older folks can remember our parents not letting us go swimming in the summer because of polio risk. We’ve made great progress against many other vaccine-preventable diseases. Today’s children won’t get sick with chickenpox, mumps, and measles like I did. We even have two vaccines against viruses that cause cancer: human papillomavirus (HPV) and hepatitis B.