Diseases Go Underground…But Are Still a Risk

While many diseases have gone away, some merely lurk in the shadows. Measles, a childhood disease that used to be widespread in the United States, largely vanished among the young in this country starting in the 1980s, thanks to the development and implementation of a vaccination program, according to the World Health Organization. More than 2.5 million children died each year before that vaccination program was implemented and made widely available.

Still, more than 120,000 children die each year from measles-related complications. Many poor countries experience epidemics, but some measles cases in the United States can be attributed to not being vaccinated. In 2014, there were more than 635 cases reported in the United States, many of them in a largely unvaccinated Amish community in Ohio.

The UK has also seen its infection rates rise, according to the British National Institute of Health, largely attributed to rising tides of Third World immigration.

Forgotten Diseases Making a Comeback

While measles has been one of the main returning diseases, it’s not alone. Here are some other relatively rare conditions that have suddenly reappeared on the scene.

1)    Yellow fever – A viral hemorrhagic fever caused by infected mosquitoes, yellow fever, so named because of the jaundice that affects some patients, once was so prevalent that Boston issued quarantine orders because of large numbers of cases in Mexico and Cuba. But even those tactics couldn’t hold off the disease, which finally hit America just before 1700. One particularly bad outbreak in Philadelphia killed as many as 5,000 people in 1793. A vaccine was created in 1936 that eliminated most cases in developed countries. Still, an estimated 200,000 people still get it around the world, and the World Health Organization attributes 30,000 deaths per year to yellow fever. The mosquito that carries the disease is still around in the American South, leading researchers and medical professionals to worry that the unvaccinated there could be subject to a new outbreak.