As political kooks work to destroy public health, there sure are a lot of horrible diseases just waiting to get back into the business of killing humans. The anti-vax crackpots don't even know what they are.
The year I was born, there were 57,628 cases of polio in the United States. My childhood best friend was a polio victim who wore metal braces on his legs.
We lined up in the school gym to get polio vaccines -- first the Salk killed-virus version, then the Sabin weakened-virus dose.
Widespread vaccination works. The disease is now regarded as "eliminated" in the United States and indeed most of the world.
But it is not gone. It waits for us to be stupid.
Then there was tuberculosis, called the "white death" because its victims looked pale. We bought "Christmas seals" -- decorate stamps for our holiday mail -- to raise funds to fight it. The town where I grew up had a huge TB sanitorium. By the 1970s it was closed and eventually became City Hall.
But don't turn your back on TB. It was still killing in the 1960s -- Vivien Leigh, of "Gone with the Wind" fame, died of TB in 1967. It is not gone.
In fact, TB in the United States increased by 5% in 2022, to 8,300 cases.
@steve
There is a measles outbreak right now among the students of Moscow State University right now and there is shortage of vaccines in Moscow.
These deceases are coming back all around the world as people get convinced that vaccination its something unnecessary or even dangerous and the whole COVID thing didn't improve the situation to say the least, I think it made people trust the vaccines even less 😫
