Education vital to vaccination effort

Humanity has been in eternal conflict with infectious disease throughout history. Perhaps no disease better illustrates the vast range of impacts of epidemic disease than smallpox, which resulted in the deaths of more than 7 million people. In 18th century Europe, at least 400,000 people died annually from smallpox. One-third of the survivors went blind.

In 1796, Sir Edward Jenner in England successfully introduced the technique of cowpox vaccination demonstrating its subsequent protective effect against smallpox. Today, due to the effectiveness of worldwide smallpox vaccination programs, that disease has been effectively eradicated from the planet.

However, this is not the case for other consequential infectious diseases. Two years ago, a whooping cough epidemic swept through California, where vaccination rates are steadily lagging. Contrary to any ordinary expectation, it is often the most affluent parents who are shunning immunization. Some of these anti-vaccine proponents are highly educated people being misled by social media.

There is no doubt that parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are well meaning. However, their actions are ill advised on two levels. The first is that refusing to appropriately vaccinate themselves or their child exposes both of them to the risks of deadly infections that can be entirely avoided. Yet, although vaccination is safe and highly effective, it does have its limits. This links to the other critical factor that makes universal vaccination so crucial. No vaccination ever devised provides 100-percent protection and some individuals in any population cannot be vaccinated. This includes very young infants whose immune systems are not yet mature enough for vaccination and members of our community that are immunosuppressed due to diseases that weaken their immune system from a variety of illnesses including cancer.

Their protection is through our actions. When there are high levels of vaccination within any community, the infectious agent is unable to find enough hosts to reproduce and sustain itself within that population. This level of community-wide protection is termed herd immunity. It is our joint responsibility, all of us together, to be part of the process of achieving this level of immunity both in our own interests and for the protection of the other members of our community.

The next outbreak of a preventable infectious disease with its incumbent tragedies is always lurking. A political committee to examine the evidence based on ideological biases is not needed.

The critical ingredient to the success of vaccination programs is education. There needs to be a concerted program to recover our eroded memories of the consequences of now distant epidemic diseases that have been conquered or reduced through vaccination. The success of vaccination programs depends on being familiar with the bitter lessons of our continuous struggle with epidemic disease. Such an educational process must be ever ongoing.