In Hawaii there is no rabies. The animals who were brought to the islands originally didn’t carry it, it is too far from the mainland or other islands for animals who carry it to travel naturally, and live animals brought into the state by humans are carefully screened and quarantined before being allowed in. In all 49 other states rabies is endemic.
When I was a kid my siblings and I contracted just about everything, all of what used to be called “ordinary childhood diseases”. Chicken pox, measles, mumps, German measles, the list goes on. We didn’t get it but I had classmates members of whose families contracted polio. We were vaccinated against smallpox and inoculated against tetanus and whopping cough. Today’s children and young people have multiple immunizations available to them and these diseases are largely as fantastical and historical to them as smallpox or black plague was to us. Their life experience is enormously different from ours. They have vastly less personal experience with disease.
There is presently an outbreak of measles in Europe. The editors of the Washington Post remark:
Measles was eliminated in the United States by 2000 with widespread use of the vaccine. Extensive research has disproved the fears of a link between vaccination and autism, but ignorance and unfounded suspicions persist. In recent years, outbreaks have been caused by unvaccinated Americans and by foreigners bringing the virus to the United States after becoming infected abroad. This year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 107 cases in 21 states and the District, fewer than the big outbreak of 2014 with 667 cases, but still worrisome.
Meanwhile, vaccination fears are driving Italy toward folly. An amendment approved by the Italian Senate this month, supported by the populist government, suspends a requirement that parents provide proof of 10 routine vaccinations when enrolling their children in nurseries or preschools. The lower house is expected to vote next month. If approved, more people will go without immunization. Some will die. It should not be allowed to happen.
The reasons for the outbreak in Europe are the many unimmunized immigrants who have come into the countries of Europe over the last few years and loss of “herd immunity”, diminished spreadability, through failure to immunize due to unwarranted and irrational fears of immunizations.
Expect more of this. When experience of disease is reduced it blunts prudent reaction and increased exposure means increased disease. Island life was nice but we’ve been voted off the island.
Anti-vaxxers seem to act as if our current relative freedom from epidemics has always been the case, and as a result panic at even the slightest possible risk to their children from a bad allergic reaction. Hell, it hasn’t even been a hundred years since vaccinations became widespread. These deluded fools need to meet and greet some polio survivors, or brain-damaged scarlet fever victims, maybe then they might ‘get’ the reason for mass vaccinations.
It’s actually somewhat worse than that. Bacteria evolve and adapt to the measures we use to fight them. At the present rate at which new antibiotics are being approved in the U. S. we will very soon be back in the pre-antibiotic, pre-1928 days. Even what we consider minor infections today may kill us tomorrow.
It might be that new, non-antibiotic ways of treating or preventing infections using genetic or nanotechnology will come to our rescue but they aren’t here now and we can’t simply assume they ever will be.