Overview
What Is It?
A vaccine is designed to stimulate the adaptive immune system before you're exposed to the virus and bacteria so when you do encounter it, your body is ready to spring into action before the pathogen can make you sick.
The discovery and wide application of vaccines that protect against once-fatal childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and diphtheria is one of the most significant medical contributions of the past two centuries. Today, newborns get their first vaccine soon after birth ( hepatitis B), then, between one and two months begin a series of shots that will eventually protect them against 14 diseases. Worldwide, childhood vaccines prevent up to 3 million deaths each year and spare more than 750,000 children from serious disability.
Most parents vaccinate their children, with less than 1 percent of children under three years not receiving recommended vaccines. Those figures represent record-high levels of children receiving vaccines. However, children from low-income families, school-aged children and adolescents have lower immunization rates.
Vaccines are not just for kids, however. Adolescents and adults need them, too, whether to "boost" earlier immunizations that provided immunity against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus or to protect against other diseases, such as influenza , pneumonia, shingles, bacterial meningitis or, for those traveling abroad, yellow fever and typhus. Preteen girls can be vaccinated against several strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) , which cause most cervical cancers. Vaccines are also being developed to prevent malaria and HIV , the virus that causes AIDS, as well as to harness the power of the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases.
The History of Vaccines
The roots of modern vaccines stretch halfway across the world to ancient China and India where, as early as the 10th century BC, people inhaled pus from smallpox blisters to inoculate themselves against the deadly disease. But it wasn't until 1796 that a country doctor from England named Edward Jenner formally vaccinated a child against the disease.
Rather than using pus or scabs from individuals infected with smallpox, he used pus from a similar, but less virulent pox disease called cowpox. He hypothesized this would protect against smallpox because milkmaids infected with cowpox never caught smallpox, even during epidemics. Two weeks after inoculating an 8-year-old boy, Jenner tried to infect him with smallpox. Nothing happened. Voila! The first successful vaccination. (Indeed, the word vaccine comes from the Latin word "vacca" for cow).
It, however, would be nearly two centuries later before smallpox was eradicated worldwide (the last known case occurred in Somalia in 1977). Its banishment (except for samples held in Russian and American laboratories) has been heralded as one of the most significant medical achievements in histor...
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