Hans-Peter Studer - Vaccination: A Guide for Making Personal Choices

The history of vaccination extends over more than two hundred years, from the English country doctor, Edward Jenner, to genetically engineered vaccines.

Two hundred years ago, smallpox was one of the most feared diseases. At the same time the harmless cowpox illness also existed, transmitted from cattle to human beings. It had already been widely noticed that milking men and maids who caught cowpox rarely fell ill with the more dangerous human pox. The English country doctor, Edward Jenner, had the idea of making deliberate use of the protective effects of cowpox, by inoculating people with it who had not yet caught smallpox.

Although he had much success, this new method met with suspicion, only gradually becoming more widespread. For a long time, even doctors had difficulty with the idea of injecting people with poison, in order to make them sick. introduced compulsory vaccination against smallpox. This was followed by widespread vaccination campaigns in other industrialized countries, and later in less developed countries.

These vaccinations certainly protected many people from smallpox. However, in others they demonstrably led to vaccination damage, or to much more severe outbreaks of the disease, especially when people who had already been infected were vaccinated. Their bodies had to defend themselves simultaneously against two different pathogens. In India, for instance, mass vaccinations in 1967 went hand-in-hand with a severe smallpox epidemic. Only when the World Health Organization (WHO) stopped promoting the idea of mass vaccinations, recommending more targeted vaccination instead and carefully isolating people with the disease, was it possible to get rid of smallpox. Since 1977, this disease is believed to have been eradicated worldwide, and smallpox vaccination is therefore considered to be unnecessary.

Other infectious diseases, against which vaccinations were developed, have not entirely disappeared, but have been drastically reduced. Many advocates of vaccination ascribe this exclusively to inoculation programmes, as in the case of smallpox.

However, if we examine the disease and mortality statistics that are available over long periods for England, Germany and other countries, we can see that infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles or whooping cough all started to diminish before vaccinations were possible. This was probably due to improved social factors such as nutrition, hygiene, clean drinking water and better living conditions.

Social circumstances also exert a great influence on the

Meanwhile, despite some associated negative symptoms, vaccinations have become part of routine medical treatment. In the UK there are registered vaccines to combat at least twenty diseases, and throughout the world new ones are continually appearing on the market. Some are now produced as a result of genetic engineering. In all, vaccines are currently being developed for more than seventy-five infectious diseases, and large financial investments and interests are involved in this. There are eleven childhood vaccinations at the moment as well as several other possible vaccines in Britain, including varicella, hepatitis B, tuberculosis and influenza.