But several contagious and potentially deadly diseases once thought to have vanished in the United States are now reappearing. It’s a reminder that the price of good general population health is constant vigilance.
There are a number of reasons why several formerly defunct diseases are making a reappearance. One is the number of immigrants from countries where vital medical services and early childhood medical care is not as prevalent as in the United States. Illegal immigrants, who are largely poor and not monitored upon entrance may be unaware of the need for childhood inoculations and perhaps the cost of same – both in dollars and unwanted attention. These factors may keep them from obtaining the services that they should get.
Paranoid Parents Part of the Problem
But there’s also a pernicious wave of anti-vaccination parents, who believe many diseases that have foggy causes – like autism – may be tied to vaccinations that contain mild strains of certain diseases. In one prominent study, parents from wealthy Marin County, Calif., were the biggest nay-sayers when it came to having children vaccinated.
While some school districts mandate proof of certain vaccinations before admission to school, others are less stringent. The result is a higher risk of reappearance of the dreaded diseases.
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.
2) Rickets – This is a disease tied to inadequate amounts of Vitamin D and calcium in the diet, which causes weakened bones and other deformities if not treated with changes in diet and added supplements. Health officials attribute the lack of nutrients to poor wages and higher food prices, which leads to unhealthy choices.
3) Polio – A disease that once gripped no less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the polio virus was once a dreaded childhood disease that brought on crippling muscle weakness, paralysis and death. While the World Health Organization claims 80 percent of the world’s countries are free of cases of the disease, it only takes one new case to spread it among the unvaccinated. It is highly contagious and potentially could cause a major outbreak in unprotected communities.
4) Leprosy – This Biblical disease once caused sufferers to be shunned into their own isolated communities. Treatments that started to be available in the 1940s were soon supplemented by the development of a full-scale range of drugs that killed the virus that causes it. Still, there were more than 200,000 new cases of leprosy as recently as 2012, with 95 percent of them coming from 16 countries, most of them very poor. Still, Brazil and China, which are in the top five of the world’s economies, were among the countries listed as harboring lepers.
5) Plague – You’ve seen the movies where a cart goes through the streets as a crier yells, “Bring out your dead!” That was the world known to those suffering from the Black Death in Europe’s Middle Ages, a disease that killed two-thirds of the European population when it peaked in the 1300s. The bubonic plague still exists even in the face of modern medicine, carried by fleas to human hosts. There are up to 3,000 cases of plague reported each year, according to the World Health Organization, and some even appear in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 15 cases in 2015.
There are other diseases that are still around and may be growing in the number of cases, including whooping cough, scarlet fever, chicken pox and the mumps. That trend is likely to continue as immigration increases and parents willingly withhold their children from vaccinations.