Vaccines in the world

Nora is crying. She just had an injection, and it hurts. What she doesn't know is that the syringe contained a vaccine. Now, she is immune to measles, rubella, and mumps. These are three very serious illnesses.

Measles can in the worst case cause death. And mumps can cause subsequent diseases like meningitis, with damage to the brain that never heals. But Nora won't ever face that. The vaccine protects her. And almost everybody in Nora's town is vaccinated the same way.

This means they will not spread the infection. It gives a protection, even for those who are not immune. In the town there is a herd immunity, and Nora contributes to that. With the help of vaccination, many difficult and deadly diseases have been fought against around the world. Like polio, a viral disease that paralyses the muscles, so that you can't move your arms and legs.

Sometimes the muscles that control breathing are paralysed. In such cases, polio causes death. By the end of the 1980s, several hundred thousand people caught polio each year. Many people were paralysed, or died. The volume of the cube shows all polio cases in the World in 1988.

What has happened since? In the year 2016, only 37 cases were registered in the whole world. That's the tiny cube there. In about thirty years, we moved from several hundred thousand cases to 37. The reason why the illness has become this rare is that people have been vaccinated, almost everywhere in the world.

If we continue vaccinating, there is a good chance polio will be totally eradicated within a few years. And intense research is currently underway to fight lots of other diseases as well. The United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, runs a campaign for vaccinating children. The goal is that no child will have to deal with the most common childhood diseases, which can all be prevented with vaccines. UNICEF educates people about vaccination.

They collect money to buy vaccines, and make sure they reach children worldwide. Has this had any results? Since the 1980s, the number of children who have died from measles has decreased by 96 per cent. And during the same time, the number of children who have died from tetanus has also decreased by 96 per cent. And smallpox has been completely eradicated.

This has happened thanks to vaccines. The campaigns for vaccination have been a great success. But wars and poverty make it difficult to reach many areas with the vaccines. And in 2017, around 20 million children worldwide are still without vaccination. So we still have a long road ahead to UNICEF's goal: that all children should have vaccination against the most common childhood diseases.

But Nora is vaccinated. She has a protection against several serious diseases, and now she has a better chance to grow up and become a healthy adult.