Who’d have thought that, after suffering terrible epidemics and fear, Americans would have a very mixed reaction towards polio vaccination? Or that those in the ‘vaccination gap’ would help to fill it.
- Stephen Mawdsley
An outbreak of measles in Disneyland sounds like a fairytale gone bad. Yet, in January 2015, states across the USA began reporting measles among individuals who had visited the Disneyland Resort in California the month before. All because a visitor to the resort had unwittingly carried the virus into the ‘Happiest Place On Earth’.
The virus is so contagious that 90% of those close to ‘patient zero’ had been at risk of being infected if they were not already immune. Epidemiologists later concluded that “substandard vaccination compliance” was likely to blame for the outbreak. Six months later, the state of California made vaccination mandatory: from July 2016, all children enrolling in school must be fully vaccinated.
Measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases have been on the rise globally in recent years. France, for instance, seemed close to eliminating measles in 2007, but in the following four years, reported a dramatic outbreak of more than 20,000 cases, with 80% of reported cases occurring in unvaccinated people.
These recent events have highlighted the ‘immunisation gap’ – the trend for parents not to have their child vaccinated because of anxiety about unforeseen health consequences. But without a certain threshold of vaccination in a community – so-called herd immunity – the unvaccinated become especially vulnerable.
Yet, vaccinations are considered to be one of the greatest public health achievements in history. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, says historian Dr Stephen Mawdsley: “We have largely forgotten what it’s like to face an epidemic sweeping through a population.” Vaccinations, it seems, have become a victim of their own success.
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Image: Elvis Presley receives a polio vaccination
Credit: The New York City Municipal Archives
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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