Polio Is Making a Comeback. Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers! - Rolling Stone

If it seems like infectious diseases are coming at us faster, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations, it’s because they are, health experts say.

If it seems like infectious diseases are coming at us faster, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations—well, it’s because they are, health experts say, largely because one thing that we can do to reliably prevent an outbreak of infectious disease—get vaccinated—is the one thing millions of people in the United States and across the developed world are failing to do.   .

A fifth of Americans have refused the Covid vaccines for themselves or their children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The extent to which people are currently rejecting scientific findings, and expertise of all kinds, is scary,” said Mary Fissell, an historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. .

“What is new now is that a couple of generations of American children have lived largely without risk of dying from infectious disease, or even getting gravely ill,” Fissell said.

It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries, with their rapid advancements in public health, communication and—most importantly—vaccines, that we managed to consistently prevent, contain or even eradicate diseases like smallpox or polio, that, in previous centuries, could kill millions.

Desperate to slow the disease’s spread, local authorities would board up infected people in their homes for 40 days, a practice that gave us the term “quarantine.” (“Quarante” is French for “40.”) If you were lucky and well-liked, your friends and neighbors would slide food into your boarded-up house.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which no longer recommends people isolate themselves after exposure to Covid.

Keeping infected people in their homes didn’t end the Covid pandemic—and it didn’t prevent death on a massive scale 700 years ago.

“Epidemic diseases like smallpox and cholera—and centuries before that, plague—swept through communities, and everyday infectious diseases like whooping cough all took a constant toll.”.

“We have over the past century or more—really since the 1860s—built up a set of institutions and cultures in public health that protect us from the worst that nature has to offer,” said John Brooke, a health historian at Ohio State University.

In the 1970s, humanity entered a new era of public health, most dramatically signaled by the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

“The combination of vaccines and antibiotics has made life much much safer, as has basic public health infrastructure like sanitation,” Fissell said.

“Will frantic obsessions with the costs of government and personal freedoms lead to a collapse of the public health bubble that protects us from nature?” he asked

They point back to that time before vaccines, when we got sick more often, died younger and tried—and mostly failed—to contain viral outbreaks by locking people in their homes

“Understanding why people reject vaccines, for example, is complex,” Fissell conceded