August is the Centre for Disease Control (CDC)’s National Immunisation Awareness Month. A month-long period to raise awareness of both the importance and incredible success of immunisations and advances in medical science. This month serves as a reminder to individuals and families to stay up to date with their immunisations, ensuring a healthier future for all. By promoting vaccine awareness, we can collectively prevent the spread of diseases and safeguard our communities.
What is Immunisation?
Immunisation is the process through which a human body becomes immune to a pathogen or infection through vaccination. This happens because the immune system – the network of systems through which human bodies fight diseases, learns to fight off a particular illness. In humans, illnesses more often than not come in the form of bacteria or viruses – two types of microorganisms that damage cells and make us sick.
Through our daily lives – eating, drinking, breathing, we naturally expose ourselves to millions of bacteria and viruses. But the vast majority of these microbes prove harmless, as our bodies produce cells specially designed to exterminate these hostile intruders. These cells make up our “immune system.” As its name implies, the immune system exists not only to help us fight off microscopic invaders but also to make us permanently immune to their effects.
The human immune system has evolved over millions of years to protect the human body from infection. But the immune system alone isn’t perfect and sometimes needs medical science to help it.
Antibiotics and Vaccines
This is where antibiotics and vaccines come in; mankind’s two super weapons when fighting disease with modern medicine.
Antibiotics are mankind’s greatest resource when dealing with hostile bacteria. First discovered by Andrew Flemming, a Scottish physician-scientist observing mould, antibiotics are a type of fungus that is poison to bacteria, killing all but the hardiest strains.
Antibiotics have saved millions of lives, and their effectiveness in saving humans cannot be understated. Illnesses like Tuberculosis and the Black Death are caused by bacterial infections, and the latter killed more people than any other disease in history. Antibiotics, meanwhile, kill 99.9% of the bacteria from these infections, allowing the immune system to pick up the stragglers.
However, antibiotics also provide an example of why immunisation is so important. Antibiotics kill bacteria incredibly effectively, but in the rare instance where even a few bacteria survive both the treatment and the immune system, “superbugs” can be born which are immune to antibiotics.
It therefore makes sense to treat antibiotics as a last resort against disease when the body is already sick. But, to prevent the birth of superbugs immunisation may be more valuable here. While an antibiotic is almost always enough to defeat a disease once, immunisation can defeat it permanently.
A major 2024 landmark study by The Lancet reveals that global immunisation efforts have saved an estimated 154 million lives – or the equivalent of 6 lives every minute of every year – over the past 50 years. The vast majority of lives saved – 101 million – were those of infants.
The study, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), shows that immunisation is the single greatest contribution of any health intervention to ensuring babies not only see their first birthdays but continue leading healthy lives into adulthood.
The History of Vaccines
Vaccines work off a simple concept – exposing your immune system to a weakened version of a virus so that your body knows how to fight it.
The original vaccine dates from 1796, when English physicist Edward Jenner began studying smallpox. Smallpox was amongst the deadliest diseases humans can contract – with a 30% mortality rate for those infected. Those that survive, meanwhile, have scars for life.
Jenner noted that milkmaids were far less likely to be infected by smallpox, and so began studying them. The reason for this, it turned out, was because the cows the milkmaids worked with contracted an alternative illness that can still infect humans but is far less lethal to them; “cowpox.” When people became infected with cowpox, they would get mildly sick, but then were immune to the effects of smallpox. Noticing this, Jenner began injecting children with puss from cowpox scars to see if they would still get sick from smallpox.
They didn’t! The immune system had learned how to fight smallpox from fighting its weaker bovine cousin, and in essence “remembered” how to fight the disease for when the children would be exposed to smallpox. The result was that children vaccinated became immune for the rest of their lives.
Smallpox vaccinations have been so successful, that the virus has been extinct since 1977 after the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) launched a global campaign to exterminate the virus once and for all starting in 1958. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of medical science in human history, showing how effective mankind can be when they work towards the collective good.
To this day, vaccines remain one of the most effective tools in fighting disease and have saved more human lives than any other medical invention in history. They not only help the body kill the virus but also prevent it from coming back.
National Immunisation Awareness Month
This National Immunisation Awareness Month allows us to highlight the importance of vaccination for people of all ages. Immunisation is one of the most cost-effective public health interventions, averting an estimated 4.4 million deaths yearly. Together, we can help raise awareness about the importance of vaccination and encourage people to talk to a healthcare provider they trust about staying up to date on their vaccinations.
