PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAMS

Immunization

One of public health’s greatest success stories, immunization is one of the most effective weapons available to combat the spread of infectious disease.

Immunization is the process of making the body resistant to a specific disease by using a vaccine, a chemical that stimulates the body to create antibodies to fight a specific infectious organism. In industrialized nations, vaccination programs protect children against measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other childhood infectious diseases.

In the United States, public health agencies provide these immunizations free of charge to children from low-income families. When small outbreaks of infectious disease threaten to grow into epidemics, public health officials may initiate new vaccination programs.

For example, in the late 1980s outbreaks of measles erupted in young adults who had been immunized once as infants. Public health officials recognized that these people may have lost their immunity and established a new vaccination program requiring a measles vaccination at 15 months and also at 4 to 6 years of age to boost immunity.

Several infectious diseases have been virtually eradicated by immunization programs. By 1979 a worldwide vaccination program had eliminated smallpox, a viral disease once responsible for more than 2 million deaths a year.

Poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio, has been virtually eliminated from most developed nations of the world, and the incidence of tetanus, whooping cough, and diphtheria has been drastically reduced worldwide.

Global vaccination programs require extensive financial support and an army of health care professionals over long periods of time. Prohibitive costs prevent millions of children in developing countries from being immunized against measles, mumps, and other easily preventable childhood diseases.

Even when resources are available, poor road and distribution systems and regional political upheavals may limit the success of vaccination programs.

For example, immunization efforts to eradicate Guinea worm, a parasite that causes painful and often debilitating skin infections, have reduced annual incidence from 1 million cases in 1981 to 80,000 cases in 1997. But momentum toward complete eradication has slowed significantly because the remaining cases are primarily in western and central Africa, especially in the Republic of the Sudan, where civil war interferes with national and international public health efforts to eliminate the disease.

The United Nations estimates that up to 4 million lives could be saved annually if existing, but under-used vaccinations were fully implemented.