Diseases resurface with decline in vaccinations

Despite the continuing technological and scientific advances in medicine, old disease threats are starting to resurface as public health problems. Some argue that we are rapidly approaching a “post-antibiotic” era due to the increasingly bleak problem of multi-drug resistant bacteria. Antibiotics do not do squat for viral infections, but antiviral drug resistance is also a serious issue. The search for new drugs to treat infections is ongoing, but the reality of the situation is that this is always going to be an arms race. Preventing infections from spreading is a more sustainable approach. Behavioral measures can help, especially with infections spread through close contact, and sanitation is effective for control of a lot of food-borne and water-borne illnesses, but the most effective protection against extremely contagious illnesses is often vaccines. With vaccines, we have eradicated smallpox, nearly eliminated poliovirus and made potentially serious illnesses that used to be incredibly common in childhood, such...