Medical Marvel

     What's worse, yawning at a medical miracle or denying it?  Either way is a vote for ignorance, superstition, barbarism.  It's unsurprising that some of the biggest vaccine skeptics and the most blase are to be found in well-off, highly advanced countries: living in a bubble, it's easy to believe they're not a big deal, or even bad.

     Not everyone has that luxury.  Malaria, for example, kill over six hundred thousand people every year -- mostly children -- and sickens millions.  Tropical countries are hardest hit.  There's finally a working vaccine, and yesterday Cameroon joined a list of African countries rolling it out with routine childhood vaccinations.

     Humans have been using some form of vaccination for centuries; variolation against smallpox arrived in North America over 40 years before the American Revolution. 

     And the U. S. appears to be having more frequent outbreaks of measles these days, thanks to people dodging vaccinations for their children.  This is significant because measles, uniquely as far as I can find out, wipes the slate clean for your immune system, knocking out all of the cells that "remember" how to fight every other virus you've had.  Getting a case of the measles is no big deal in and of itself for most people with access to modern medicine -- but they'll be getting a lot of other things all over again afterward, some of which are a very big deal to catch as an adult.

     Vaccines work.  They're making life better for billions of people.