Word: diphtheria
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...life; today the number is 20, with as many as five in a single visit. Ouch! The first ever five-in-one combination vaccine will take a bit of the sting out of this rite of passage. Infants can now be protected against hepatitis B and polio, along with diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), with a single injection given at 2, 4 and 6 months, eliminating half a dozen shots in the process...
When I started working with UNICEF, one of the statistics I saw was that 40,000 children die every day from preventable diseases, such as measles, tetanus, diphtheria. The latest figures show that the number is down to 29,000. This gives me a certain sense of satisfaction--to know that our efforts make a difference...
...reasons for the shortages differ for each vaccine. For example, the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis) vaccine got hit by a double whammy. One of its major producers, then called Wyeth Lederle Vaccines, left the market just as new rules to cut down the mercury in the vaccine began to take effect. Aventis, another major DTaP producer, was caught off guard and had trouble overhauling its manufacturing process while simultaneously ramping up production. Making vaccines isn't a particularly profitable business, so there isn't a lot of competition for the work...
...dawn of the 20th century, the roster of illnesses that spelled almost inevitable death seemed to stretch forever. Cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, cirrhosis, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis and even the flu were relentless killers. Some victims might hang on to eke out a normal life span, albeit in disability and pain; some might even recover entirely. But survival was purely a crapshoot, with depressingly unfavorable odds. The hospital was a place where people went to die, not to be cured...
...George Washington, when Edward Jenner first scraped the scabs from milkmaids infected with cowpox to inoculate people against smallpox. By the end of the 20th century, vaccines had conquered many of man's most dreaded plagues, eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world. Vaccines had done their work so well, in fact, that in the context of 21st century medicine, with its smart drugs and high-tech interventions, they seemed almost quaint and out of date, a kind of biomedical backwater...