Don't Hesitate…Vaccinate! (And Wash Your Hands, Of Course)

One interesting result of the Covid-19 pandemic is how it has turned our attention to vaccines and the positive and life-saving part they play in our health.

Vaccines have been one of the biggest success stories of modern medicine. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that at least 10 million deaths were prevented between 2010 and 2015 thanks to vaccinations delivered around the world. Many millions more lives were protected from the suffering and disability associated with diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, whooping cough, measles and polio.

In short, there is worldwide medical consensus that vaccines are safe and necessary. Currently, all eyes are on the world’s scientists as the race is on to develop a vaccine that can give protection against the coronavirus.

Strangely, in modern times, vaccination rates have been dropping across the developed world. In France, the country that experiences the strongest vaccination resistance but is also the birthplace of vaccines, there have been measles outbreaks over the past few years of a scale that is usually only seen in low-income countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia.

The WHO has warned that this is becoming widespread in other European countries too. In the States, where measles was declared “eradicated” in 2000, the disease surfaced again, most notably in 2015, when it made headlines for being spread at Disneyland.

Locally, the anti-inoculation campaign is not as widespread as in Europe and the States, but even so, as the rapid spread of Covid-19 around the world has illustrated so well, the issue of infectious diseases affects us all. Take measles as an example. If you aren’t inoculated against measles, your chance of contracting – and spreading – it is 35 percent greater than someone who got the jab, say medical experts quoted in business magazine Forbes.

BUT IT’S JUST MEASLES?