Because of vaccination, we no longer see smallpox, and polio is heading towards eradication. No wonder vaccination is considered a modern miracle.
Vaccination is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine. No other medical intervention has done more to save lives and improve quality of life.
Smallpox ravaged and killed thousands of people in Europe in the 18th century. Once caught, the disease would kill around a third of victims and leave survivors scarred or blinded.
Smallpox was officially declared wiped out in 1980. If it were still common around the world, it would cause an estimated two million deaths every year.
Polio:
By 2002, the incurable and deadly disease of polio had also been eradicated from much of the world, including the UK, the rest of Europe, the western Pacific and the Americas.
Polio, caused by a virus that destroys nerve cells, used to threaten millions of people worldwide. At its peak, more than 1,000 children a day across the world were paralysed by polio.
The disease paralysed up to one in 1,000 children and one in 75 adults who caught the infection – not only in their arms or legs but also their breathing muscles, which put them at risk of suffocation.
Then, the only way to keep children with polio-induced respiratory problems alive was to put them in a giant metal machine, an ‘iron lung’, to help them breathe. Hospital wards with children in iron lungs were common as recently as 50 years ago.
Whooping cough and diphtheria:
Thanks to the NHS and its childhood vaccination programme, children in the UK are now protected against many dangerous diseases. As well as polio, this includes many other potentially deadly infections, such as diphtheria and whooping cough (pertussis).
In 1940 there were more than 60,000 cases and 3,283 deaths from diphtheria in the UK. Before the 1950s, there were an average of 120,000 cases of whooping cough each year in the UK.
By 2008, vaccination of children had almost eliminated diphtheria (there were just six cases in the UK that year – all imported), and dramatically reduced whooping cough to 1,028 cases.
Meningitis C:
Meningitis C has been virtually eliminated since vaccination was introduced in the UK in 1999 (the first country in the world to offer the jab). There has been a 99% reduction in cases of meningitis C among under-20s since vaccination started.
In 1998, the year before the vaccine was introduced, there were 78 deaths among children and teens. There were no deaths in these groups in 2007 and 2008.
All these diseases are now so rare that it’s easy to underestimate the importance of children’s vaccinations.
But whooping cough and diphtheria are still a threat. The diseases may be rare now, but if children aren’t vaccinated, they can return with a vengeance.
After a scare about the safety of the whooping cough vaccine in the 1970s and 80s, parents stopped vaccinating their children against the disease. This led to three epidemics, and at least 100 children died after catching the disease.
When Russia’s childhood vaccination programme collapsed during the break-up of the Soviet Union, it triggered a mass epidemic of diphtheria.
The future:
There will be many more potentially life-saving vaccines in the years to come. Research is thriving, with more than 150 new vaccines currently being tested.
Soon we will have an improved pneumococcal vaccine that offers protection against more strains of the disease.
There's also a vaccine against a leading cause of diarrhoea called rotavirus, and promising work on longer-lasting vaccines against flu.
There’s hope for a vaccine against meningitis B – the most feared type of meningitis. It affects around 1,200 people (mostly children) in the UK each year, and kills around 80 annually.
Find out which vaccinations you and your family are eligible for on the NHS by using our vaccination checklist.
