Not only does a push for a chickenpox vaccine protect a child and his or her classmates, it can also protect grandparents who may not have had chickenpox. Protecting the elderly is also the idea behind another vaccination that many of us line up for each winter: the flu shot. Between 12,...
The process of creating, testing and producing a vaccine in mass quantities can take many years from start to finish because the industry is highly regulated. Before scientists even begin to formulate a vaccine, researchers have to study the particularvirusor bacteria. Basically, they have to isol...
While the pertussis bacteria can live for 3-5 days on a surface or an object, it’s unlikely to spread that way. As a precaution, if you think you’ve been exposed to whooping cough or you have whooping cough, thoroughly disinfect anything you may have come in contact with while you w...
Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard. Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60...
We began to look at the poliomyelitis literature and found that another and much more comprehensive environmental theory of the disease had been put forward almost immediately after the early outbreaks, although it never gained mainstream attention. This theory proposed that what ...
Not only does a push for a chickenpox vaccine protect a child and his or her classmates, it can also protect grandparents who may not have had chickenpox. Protecting the elderly is also the idea behind another vaccination that many of us line up for each winter: the flu shot. Between 12...