I am now doing a project on the role of antivaxxers and the spread of infectious disease for one of my classes. There are very apparent trends between the 2. For example in Japan Pertussis more commonly known as whooping cough was down to less than 100 cases per year. Then some time in the late 70s there was a scare about the vaccine, people in turn stopped receiving the vaccination for whooping cough. Cases sky rocketed into the 1000s and a disease that was nearly eradicated was now thriving again. In the 80s people starting receiving the vaccine again and the disease fell back into the double digits of cases per year. Unfortunately we are seeing similar trends of denying vaccinations in the US. In particular we have been experiencing a bad measles outbreak. A disease that was absent from the US for quite some time. It was brought back recently when an unvaccinated person traveled to the another part of the world contracted it and returned home. The person lived in a population with low MMR vaccination rates. Measles bagan to spread to to other communities with low vaccination and all of the sudden this disease that was once a thing of the past is now prevalent again essentially because people willing chose not to vaccinate. This now puts people who medically can’t be vaccinated at a serious risk of contracting infectious disease because now the people around them can spread it.
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