Diseases like measles, polio, whooping cough and diphtheria have already disappeared from most parts of Australia. Why do we need to keep vaccinating children against these diseases?
These diseases are much less common now, but the bacteria and viruses that cause them are still present. The potential problem is kept in check by routine vaccination programs. In countries where vaccination rates have declined, vaccine preventable diseases have sometimes reappeared. For example, Holland has one of the highest rates of fully vaccinated people in the world. However, in the early 1990s there was a big outbreak of polio among a group of Dutch people who belonged to a religious group that objected to vaccination. While many of these people suffered severe complications like paralysis, polio did not spread into the rest of the Dutch community. This was due to the high rate of vaccination against polio, which protected the rest of the Dutch community. There have been recent outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and rubella in Australia, and a number of children have died. Cases of tetanus and diphtheria, although rare, still occur. So even though these diseases are much less
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