Every baby today is given about 70 doses of 16 vaccines (per CDC). How did babies survive in the 1980s with about half the doses of only 7 vaccines? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Mikka Luster, on Quora:
Every baby today is given about 70 doses of 16 vaccines (per CDC). How did babies survive in the 1980s with about half the doses of only 7 vaccines?
Firstly, they didn’t. Check out the death rates from herpes zoster (shingles). Shingles develops almost exclusively as a reactivation of the he varicella zoster virus which gives children the chickenpox. While mortality in children with chickenpox is “relatively” low, only 0.05%, that’s still quite a few children in unvaccinated cohorts.
Where it gets bad, though, is when the virus reactivates, which it generally does when the immune system is compromised. It doesn’t have to be HIV, though it’s often a tell that it’s also present, it is enough to get something else you’re not vaccinated against. In this case, someone with shingles has an almost 1 in 100 chance of pneumonia, hearing problems, blindness, brain inflammation (encephalitis), or death. We’re just now, as the people who were vaccinated in their youth in 1980 get into the first age levels where shingles are more common, seeing a decline in shingles deaths.
Back in 1983 and onward, people died of this disease. Well, they died of pneumonia as a result, or they died of AIDS from HIV combined with shingles, or any other combination. In short, while anti-vaxxers love to trot out the “shingles don’t kill, only HIV kills,” many elderly could have been spared injury or death if they’d been vaccinated back then.
Take measles. Yes, we immunized against measles before (see below), but starting in 1989 the Robert-Koch-Institute in Germany published some landmark findings, that changed how we did it. This meant more combined vaccinations, but it also meant that deaths from complications (myelitis and encephalitis are way up front, there) of a measles infection between the vaccination points were dropped to eight percent of before.
Take haemophilius influenza Type B (HiB/B). Once the leading cause of deaths in infants, partially even labeled as “sudden infant death syndrome,” it has dropped considerably in the US since the 80s. Due to routine use of the Hib conjugate vaccine in the U.S. since 1990, the incidence of invasive Hib disease has decreased to 1.3/100,000 in children. However, Hib remains a major cause of lower respiratory tract infections in infants and children in developing countries where the vaccine is not widely used
Take Hepatitis B. Once acquired it doesn’t have to lead to acute liver failure, it can also become chronic and change the infected person’s life forever. We’ve started vaccinating infants instead of only high risk adults in 1990, and since then the number of children dying of liver failure as well as adults who don’t have to go through a modified diet for the rest of their lives, dying early from complications, has gone down to 1/308th of where it was in the 80s.
Take Rotavirus. It attacks your intestinal tract and leads to diarrhea, which — especially in children — can lead to death. Since we’re giving Rotavirus vaccinations, 1998, no child has died in Europe from Rotavirus alone (sixteen deaths in severely sick children who caught it off unvaccinated kids). In Europe, hospitalization rates following infection by rotavirus have decreased by 65% to 84% following the introduction of the vaccine. Globally, vaccination has reduced hospital admissions and emergency department visits by a median of 67%.
All in all, we’re developing new vaccines every year. Some have helped reduce especially child and infant mortality to an all time low. Some have helped prevent severe disfigurement (Polio, for example), or later deaths (Measles, Chickenpox, Hepatitis B, HiB, etc.) We’re still way, way, below what the human body can handle in terms of vaccinations, any story to the contrary is a lie peddled by anti-vaxx interest groups. And we’re getting safer in how we administer them every year, too.
In 1980 there were more risks, true. But that's like saying you don’t want to take the ambulance to the hospital because there’s a chance you’ll die in a car accident and would rather take your chance with that heart attack at home. It’s a totally non-equivalent level of risk, and one that has gone down so radically in the past 25 years, there is no serious reason not to take it.
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