Vaccines Stage A Comeback

They defeated some of the deadliest diseases known to man. Now they are helping defend us against bioterrorism. And soon, inoculations may protect us from killers like AIDS, Ebola, heart disease and e

You seldom see them on the cover of Prevention Magazine, but vaccines are the great prevention success story of modern medicine. They are not perceived as new or sexy; they have been around since the days of 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...

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