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Historic British Child Immunisation Poster from the 1950s issued by Glaxo Laboratories Ltd., Greenford, Middlesex; designer unknown. -Image from the Antikbar Original Vintage Posters collection |
What short collective memories people have. I have just been going back over old posts to label them before Google disappears them forever and came across one from 2011 when we were utterly distraught because our newborn granddaughter had caught Whooping Cough in the hospital.
She had to be resuscitated at least three times while there and twice more after being allowed to go home, where she had to remain on an oxygen monitor. I also had to have the ‘Grandma Booster’ before I was allowed to hold her for the first time.
Until I was revaccinated against Tetanus prior to helping out with a penguin rescue (after an oil spill), I had no idea that even the vaccinations we had had as children, could become less effective over time. Now I was reminded again, so make sure you are up to date, before finding yourself in a potentially risky situation. This also means that that there are quite likely a number of adults who are catching and transmitting diseases even though they may have gone through all necessary immunisations and be showing little in the way of symptoms.
The Return of Preventable Childhood Diseases
Whooping Cough (Pertussis) was never really eliminated the way measles was — it just got rare enough, for long enough (roughly the 1950s–1970s), that a generation of parents (and doctors) genuinely believed it belonged to history. However, after a couple of generations of complacency and some deliberate anti-vax sentiment, there are now such holes in our collective immunity that the disease once again, is transmitted much more easily.
In 2024 -25, the worst year yet, Australia had 57,257 confirmed cases of Whooping Cough, the largest number since records began in 1991, while the USA had 35,435. Though the number of deaths was relatively small in both cases, this is appalling for a preventable disease.
In the UK the numbers were smaller but still elevated compared to historical baselines. In Australia 57% of cases were in children aged 5 to 14. By contrast, in the UK for the first quarter of 2026 the majority of cases were in those aged 15 years or older. Since the introduction of maternal vaccination in pregnant women in the UK in 2012, the number of infant deaths from pertussis was greatly reduced. Of the 33 infants who died between 2013 and 2025, 27 mothers had not been vaccinated. The UK report also states maternal pertussis vaccine effectiveness against infant death at around 91%.
While numbers for the three countries above have since fallen, they appear to be rising globally. In 2024 the World Health Organisation recorded 941,582 Pertussis cases, a 5.8-fold jump from 163,388 cases in 2023, although reporting for 2026 remains patchy.
Other Diseases
Measles
Much the same is happening with respect to other childhood diseases. As of the CDC's September 24, 2026 update, 3,659 confirmed measles cases have been reported in the United States in 2026. Of these, 17 cases were among international visitors, there have been 40 new outbreaks, and 95% of confirmed cases (3,478 of 3,659) are outbreak-associated. This is now the highest annual case count since elimination in 2000, with three months still left in the year. Although death from measles itself is relatively rare — around 1 to 2 per 1,000 cases, according to the US CDC — one of its complications, SSPE (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a fatal brain disease that can emerge years after apparent recovery), occurs in about 4 to 11 per 100,000 cases for Canada) or 1 per 100,000 (UNICEF), rising to around 18 per 100,000 in children infected before age 2.
Other complications include:
- Pneumonia — the big one. About 1 in 20 children with measles develops pneumonia, and it's the leading cause of measles death in children.
- Ear infections (otitis media) — common, and can cause permanent hearing loss in some cases.
- Croup/laryngotracheobronchitis and diarrhoea — frequent, especially in young children, and diarrhoea-driven dehydration is a major cause of death in poorer countries.
- Encephalitis occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 cases, can cause convulsions, and often leaves survivors with permanent brain damage, deafness, or intellectual disability.Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain and can be caused viral or bacterial infection or as an auto immune response. See more here.
Overall, roughly 1 in 5 unvaccinated Americans who catch measles ends up hospitalised, and 1–2 per 1,000 children who get it will die, mostly from pneumonia or encephalitis. Pennsylvania just hit a new record (5/10/2026) According to the Washington Post, with over one thousand measles cases, the highest in 30
Pregnancy-specific risks
Measles during pregnancy raises the risk of pneumonia (in up to 18% of pregnant women who catch it), premature labour, miscarriage, and maternal death. A baby can also be born with congenital measles, which carries its own risk of encephalitis, death, and a higher future risk of SSPE
Immune Amnesia
Another long-term risk which has only recently been recognised is 'Immune Amnesia' which has reshaped how experts talk about measles. Immune amnesia" — this is the one that's reshaped how experts talk about measles in just the last few years. The measles virus doesn't just make you sick in the moment — it actively destroys existing immune memory cells, effectively wiping out your immune system's accumulated record of past infections and past vaccinations.
Studies suggest unvaccinated children can lose somewhere between 11% and 73% of their existing antibody repertoire, leaving a child who "recovered" from measles more vulnerable to a whole range of other infections — flu, pneumonia, whatever else is circulating — and some research links this to elevated all-cause childhood mortality in the aftermath of measles outbreaks, not just deaths directly attributed to measles itself.
Globally, measles deaths have fallen 88% between 2000 and 2024 largely due to widespread immunisation, but an estimated 95,000 children - mostly under five still died and despite the huge success of vaccination there has been an upsurge in measles cases - 11 million in 2024, even in developed countries. In the WHO's Mediterranean region for example, cases have risen by 86% in the Mediterranean. In the EU by 47% and by 42% in South East Asia. Largely due to greater vaccination coverage, Africa is bucking this trend with 40% fewer cases and 50% fewer deaths.
Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR)
Today a combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine is given to all children, boys and girls alike, at 12 months, with a second dose at 18 months (Australia) or 4–6 years (US, UK). The MMR vaccine was first licensed in the U.S. in 1971 and introduced in many countries during the 1970s and 1980s as part of routine childhood vaccination programs. It was introduced in Australia in 1989 as part of the National Immunisation Program. The second dose was added in 1994. While there may be some minor side effects immediately after immunisation -severe reactions to immunisation are extremely rare, they are infinitely safer than getting measles, mumps or rubella.
Rubella
Although Rubella is commonly called German Measles, it is a different, generally mild viral disease, but one which has especially severe consequences for babies when it occurs in pregnant women. Ninety per cent of babies born to women who contract it in the first ten weeks of pregnancy, are likely to have one or more of the following birth defects including learning disabilities, eye cataracts leading to severe visual impairment, deafness, heart abnormalities, stunted growth, and inflammatory lesions (damaged tissue) in the brain, liver, lungs and bone marrow..
Babies affected in this way are said to have congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). During the last Rubella epidemic in the USA in 1964-65 an estimated 12.5 million people caught it. Eleven thousand pregnant women lost their babies, 2,100 newborns died and 20,000 babies were born with congenital CRS. Once the vaccine became available the number of people who caught rubella fell to around 10 per year.
MMR must be given prior to pregnancy, so check your status if you are thinking of becoming pregnant. Thanks to vaccination, the UK was officially free of Rubella in 2015 (no reported cases for a year), along with its associated difficulties. In the UK the vaccine is estimated to have prevented 1.5 million cases of Rubella, 1300 related birth defects and 25,000 terminations.
Initially in the 1970s, the vaccine was only given to adolescent girls -those most at risk, but it is now routinely given to all babies, beginning at about 12 months to prevent the spread of the disease.
As of January this year, the UK has also added Chickenpox (Varicella) to its MMR even though it's been standard in the US, Australia, Canada and Germany since the 1990s–2000s.
Mumps
The other M besides Measles in the MMR vaccine stands for Mumps. Mumps is another comparatively mild viral disease which can have lasting complications. Easily recognisable by the swelling of the parotid salivary glands which sit just below and in front of the ears and make one or both cheeks puff up, it can cause the following:-
- Orchitis (testicular swelling/inflammation) — in up to 30% of unvaccinated post-pubertal males, versus only ~6% in vaccinated patients who still catch it. Usually one-sided; can cause testicular atrophy, but current evidence doesn't actually support a link to permanent infertility, despite the old popular fear — at most, temporary subfertility in some cases.
- Oophoritis (ovarian inflammation) — roughly 5–7% of unvaccinated post-pubertal females.
- Viral meningitis — up to 10% of unvaccinated cases; usually mild, though encephalitis (rarer) can be serious or fatal.
- Pancreatitis — up to 4–7% of unvaccinated cases, usually mild.
- Permanent deafness — the standout rare-but-real one: roughly 1 in 20,000 cases, usually one-sided.
Diphtheria
Diphtheria Vaccine, along with those for Whooping Cough and Tetanus, was part of the original Triple Antigen Vaccine given to infants. Today the full-strength Triple Antigen for children is known as DPTa and the booster shot for adolescents and adults is now called dTpa to indicate lower dosage of other ingredients apart from Tetanus.
Diphtheria, a bacterial infection, was a major killer in Australia in the early 20th century. The worst single year was 1921, with 23,199 notified cases nationally (an annual notification rate of 426 per 100,000 people) and 898 deaths — the highest death toll in a single year on record. Between 1926 and 1935 more than 4,000 Australians died from diphtheria alone. Even with medical treatment available, roughly 1 in 10 people with respiratory diphtheria died from it in that era.
The turning point came in 1932 when a vaccination program began in schools. By 1975 it had become part of the National Immunisation Program. The effect was dramatic and durable — there was no reported diphtheria case or death in Australia at all between 1992 and the current (2025–26) outbreak. Since 1999, Australia has recorded a grand total of just 4 diphtheria deaths in 25 years.
Now it’s coming back. The current outbreak (2025–26), concentrated in the Northern Territory and Kimberley region of WA, is occurring specifically in areas where childhood vaccination coverage has slipped — Australia's overall childhood immunisation rate dropped to a five-year low last year, and NT diphtheria coverage in five-year-olds sits at the lowest of any state/territory (91.9%). About 94% of cases since January 2026 have been in Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities
Nigeria has recorded its worst-ever outbreak since 2022 — over 20,000 suspected cases and 872 confirmed deaths by December 2025. The European Union/EEA reported 151 cases in 2024.
Polio
In the 1950s when I started Primary School, there were still children wearing heavy leg braces and others who had been paralysed by Polio. Some also had to remain in an iron lung – a huge metal tank for years on end, because they could not breathe on their own. When Salk vaccine came in 1956, you didn’t need to tell parents to get their children immunised – they queued around the block for many hours at the Town Hall, because no one wanted their children to experience this scourge.
In Victoria's 1937–38 outbreak alone, 113 children died in under 12 months. Across the full run of epidemics from the 1930s–1960s, roughly 2,000 Australians were killed and more than 40,000 paralysed — with total infections estimated at 2–4 million people. An estimated 400,000 polio survivors still live in Australia today.This is another disease which is quietly reasserting iteelf.
- Australia: Poliovirus has been detected in wastewater in Perth as of mid-April 2026, though Australia remains at low risk due to high vaccination coverage through the National Immunisation Program. gov.au +1
- European Union
Between September and December 2024, circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) was detected in Finland, Germany, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. As of July 2026, there is no evidence of widespread local circulation in Europe, but detections continue.
- United States
The U.S. has reported polio cases in recent years, including a case in New York in 2022 after 30 years without local transmission. In 2025, there were 21 reported cases globally, with 32 cases reported in 2026 as of August 31.
- Globally
As of March 2026, polio is still a problem in some parts of the world. In 2025, there were 202 confirmed cases of cVDPV polio and 218 places where traces of the virus were found in the environment. These cases were spread across 27 countries.The good news is that since 1988, the number of polio cases has dropped by more than 99%. However, the virus hasn’t been completely eliminated yet, so health workers continue to monitor and vaccinate to prevent any outbreaks.
Tetanus
Tetanus, the third part of the Triple Antigen usually given to infants, is not contagious and doesn't spread from person to person. The bacteria, Clostridium tetani, live in soil, dust and animal manure, and infection occurs when it enters a wound. It used to be prevalent around old farming properties, but has largely been forgotten since the vaccine came along. We were always being warned about not touching old farm machinery and not going barefoot lest we tread on a rusty nail. The modern equivalent is the advice on bags of potting mix about wearing gloves to avoid cuts (and tetanus), and masks and avoid breathing in the dust, although that's mainly there to protect against Legionnaires' disease.
Tetanus remains rare, with fewer than 10 cases reported annually in Australia since 1995. As of September 6, 2026, there were 4 cases reported from January to August 2026, up from 1 case in the same period in 2025.
Elsewhere the picture is similar. In the United States, 402 tetanus cases and 37 deaths were reported between 2009 and 2023, and cases have fallen by more than 95% since 1947, while Canada and England each report only a handful of cases a year. Tetanus remains a far bigger threat in countries with lower vaccination coverage. In 2021, 7700 newborns died from neonatal tetanus can be caught through the use of non-sterile instruments or unhygenic conditions at birth.
The Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination (MNTE) Initiative begun in 1999 seeks to provide better services in that regard as well as continued monitoring and maintenance of vaccine schedules so that each person receives all six doses of TTCV vaccine before they reach adulthood.
New Additions
Hib - (Haemophilus influenzae type b) has been known since the C19th and was a major cause of death and permanent disability in young children, particularly from meningitis and epiglottitis, but also sepsis.
It wasn't usually thought of as a “killer epidemic” in the way measles or diphtheria were, because the cases were scattered. But Hib meningitis could kill around 5–10% of affected children even with treatment, and many survivors were left with hearing loss, blindness, brain damage or other neurological problems.
Although a childhood vaccine was developed in the USA in 1985, it wasn’t very effective the late 1980s and was introduced from 1987–1990 when they became part of routine infant vaccination programmes in many countries during the early 1990s. Australia added it to its National Immunisation Program in 1993.
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis B (Hep B) is a long-established viral infection that can become chronic, particularly when acquired in infancy, eventually causing cirrhosis or liver cancer.
Vaccination can prevent that long-term chain of consequences. First developed in 1987, it was increasingly refined and also added to the childhood immunisation schedule, either alone or in combination with others. In 1992 started being given to children at risk but in 2000 it was extended to all infants as part of regular childhood immunisations.
I hadn’t even heard of the last two and like me, you might be thinking, “ Good grief, how many things are we asking this tiny immune system to deal with?” but the scientific evidence doesn’t support the idea that more immunisations place infants at greater risk. Though there may be interactions between particular vaccines or schedules — what immunologists call vaccine interference and is why schedules are continually tested and adjusted, vaccines do not generally weaken immunity.
In fact, almost the opposite has happened. Modern vaccines are generally much more precisely targeted, and the total number of antigenic components has fallen dramatically.
Preventing Cervical and some other forms of Cancer
Cervical Cancer is caused by a contagious virus Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) which is easily spread by skin or sexual contact. It is the fourth most common cancer in women globally and the third in women under 44. About 80% of sexually active women will contract it in their lives. Although easily prevented with vaccination, regular screening and treatment while in the early stages, some 30,000 European women die from it every year. Thereare now over one hundred types.
In August 2006, Australian scientist Ian Frazer and the late Jian Zhou at the University of Queensland, developed the first official dose of Gardasil, a new vaccine which protects against cervical cancer was given to teenage girls at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Despite hysterical claims at the time that it would encourage promiscuity, multiple large studies have since found no such link, Australia rolled the vaccine out nationally to first to girls, and later boys, from 2007.
The results speak for themselves. For the first time since records began in 1982, there were no cervical cancer cases at all diagnosed in Australian women under 25 in 2021, and Australia is now on track to become the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem, possibly as early as 2035. Even better, the vaccine doesn’t just protect against cervical cancer. It also prevents vulvar, vaginal, anal, penile and throat cancers which have been on the rise. It has been estimated that Gardasil is responsible for saving 20 million lives.
Other countries such as Iceland, Norway and Portugal have already hit the WHO's 90% target -among the world's best, with Sweden and Denmark close behind and expected to reach it by the late 2020s. Real-world results are striking. Nationwide Danish and Swedish studies found cervical cancer was cut by 86% in Denmark and 88% in Sweden among women vaccinated before age 17.
Globally, it’s much more uneven — the global weighted average first-dose coverage for girls aged 9–14 was only around 62% in 2023, with only 15 of 132 reporting countries hitting the 90% mark. High-income countries range anywhere from near-universal down to single digits in a few outliers.
Sadly, despite successes and some wonderful results, even in Australia, coverage is starting to slip with HPV vaccination by age 15 falling from a peak of ~86% in 2020 to just under 80% in the most recent data.
Emerging Concerns
While some older childhood diseases are re-emerging because we have become complacent about immunisation, new threats are also coming down the line. I don’t think I had ever heard of Meningococcal disease before one summer in the early 2000s when several Victorian teens contracted it.
It seems that while Meningococcal disease, a disease spread by a bacterium, isn't new, its prominence and profile in Australia have changed. Cases peaked around 2000–02, fell sharply after the introduction of the MenC vaccine in 2003, then rose again from about 2013 as different strains — particularly MenW and MenY — became more prominent, with Victoria particularly affected. MenACWY vaccination followed, and today MenB accounts for most Australian cases.
Like many other viruses, meningococcus comes in different strains, and vaccines have had to evolve to cover the strains causing the most disease. Australia is now progressively expanding free access to the MenB vaccine, with Victoria joining South Australia and Queensland in funding vaccination for particular groups. Australian Government — meningococcal vaccination
Climate change brings another order of risk with regard to diseases whose vectors and transmission are influenced by temperature, rainfall and other environmental conditions. Lyme disease, for example, has expanded northwards in the United States since the 1990s as the ticks which carry it expand their range, while in Australia warmer conditions and changing rainfall can increase the risk and potential burden of mosquito-borne diseases such as Ross River virus. For these emerging threats, in many cases there is no vaccine at all. Those are the diseases we should be concentrating on now, instead of having to refight old battles which were won long ago.
How countries are encouraging (or discouraging)Vaccination.
·
United States — fragmented,
insurance-dependent, politically contested
Vaccines are largely free at the point of care — almost all insurers, Medicaid,
and the federal Vaccines for Children (VFC) program must cover
ACIP-recommended vaccines with no out-of-pocket cost, and VFC alone supplies
free vaccines to roughly half of American children. But there's no national
mandate system: school-entry requirements are set state by state, exemption
rules vary widely, and the whole machine runs on the CDC's advisory panel
(ACIP) continuing to recommend a given vaccine — a political fault line, since
the 2025 ACIP overhaul showed how quickly that "free" guarantee can
wobble.
·
Australia — free
vaccines plus a financial/access lever (No Jab No Pay / No Jab No Play)
Vaccines are free under the National Immunisation Program. On top, the federal No
Jab No Pay policy ties full Family Tax Benefit Part A and Child Care Subsidy to children being up to date — non-medical ("conscientious")
objection was explicitly removed as a valid exemption in 2015. State-based No
Jab No Play laws go further in most states/territories, barring
unvaccinated children from childcare/kindergarten enrolment outright (though
not from primary/high school). It's a hybrid: free access plus a real, enforced
financial consequence for opting out.
·
The Scandinavian
Countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland) — entirely voluntary, high
trust, free and accessible
No mandates, no financial penalties, no school-entry requirement at all —
vaccination is offered free through a universal, trusted public-health system,
and parents simply take it up. It works: Finland has reached as high as 99%
MMR coverage purely voluntarily, matching or beating countries that
mandate it. The consistent finding across comparative studies is that mandatory
and voluntary systems don't reliably differ in the coverage they achieve —
access and trust appear to matter more than compulsion.
Vaccine Hesitancy
Unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy is on the rise, even in countries such as Australia, Germany and Scandinavia. Just because we do not see much of these diseases does not mean they have gone away, but rather that an awful lot of people worked very hard to make that possible and if we stop doing our part by having ourselves and our children immunised, they will return with a vengeance.
A 2025 JAMA - a consortium of peer-reviewed medical journals published by the American Medical Association (AMA) modelled what would happen over a twenty -five year period if there was a 50% drop in US childhood vaccinations. It concluded that this could produce 197 diphtheria cases over 25 years — alongside a projected 51.2 million measles cases, 9.9 million rubella cases, 4.3 million poliomyelitis cases, 10.3 million hospitalisations, and 159 200 deaths.
However, in contrast to earlier years when there was greater trust in governments, institutions and public health departments specifically – they had after all collectively protected us from things like food-borne illnesses, bad pharmaceuticals and visibly bad air pollution, now both public trust and funding in some countries are on the wane.
Doubt and Disinformation
General distrust in science — from climate science to vaccines, evolution and public health — has been fostered by a number of groups and studied by researchers looking for the common patterns behind it. These include conspiracy claims about scientists and funding, cherry-picking evidence, invoking supposed experts who disagree with the scientific consensus, demanding impossible levels of certainty, and using logical fallacies. John Cook's FLICC framework brings these recurring tactics together as Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry-picking and Conspiracy theories.
All I can say is be careful whom you take your advice from. Is it from a formally recognised source, verified and peer reviewed or at least from health authorities? Science is never perfect. That is its strength. It is continually updated in the light of new information.
Declining Trust in Governments and Institutions
The erosion of public trust also has much to do with politicisation and the spread of misinformation via social media. Catherine Hughes, the person in the link, lost her 32 day old son Riley to whooping cough in 2015, at the same Perth hospital where my granddaughter had been treated for the same disease a few years earlier. Catherine turned her grief into "Light for Riley," the campaign that helped to bring free maternal whooping cough vaccination to every state in Australia, and has since become one of the country's leading voices for immunisation.
It may be harsh watching babies experiencing the pain of repeated shots, but believe me it is nowhere near as bad as watching them suffer from a preventable disease or its consequences and surely no-one wants to see all those little graves in cemeteries again.
Many thanks to Claude, ChatGPT and Ecosia for helping me to find the above information, plenty of editorial discussion, some proof reading and identification of the image above.
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