Vaccines have a history of success throughout the world.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccines prevented more than 730,000 deaths and more than 322 million cases of illness among U.S. children born between 1994 and 2013.
In addition, most childhood vaccines are 90 percent to 99 percent effective in preventing disease,
according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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Here are four of the most successful vaccinations in history.
1. Measles
Cases of measles spiked in the 1950s, but by 1962, when the measles vaccine was licensed, those numbers
dropped off dramatically, according to vaccines.gov. By 1993, such outbreaks had all but disappeared. Lately, however, with a backlash toward vaccines, new cases have emerged.
2. Polio
Cases of polio began to drop off significantly in 1955, the year the first vaccine for the disease was licensed, vaccines.gov noted. Outside of the United States, polio infections have also dropped off significantly since about 1979, researchers said.
Worldwide, just 500 polio cases were tracked in three nations — Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan — according to UNICEF. That makes a massive decline from the 350,000 cases tracked in 1988,
according to the website ProCon.org.
3. Tetanus
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than 51 cases of tetanus per year have been reported along with about 10 deaths annually from 1997 to 2011, ProCon.org reported.
4. Small Pox
In the United States, children no longer need to be immunized against small pox because previous vaccines have eradicated it. In fact, the last U.S. small pox case occurred in 1948, while the last cases in the world occurred in Somalia in 1977, ProCon.org noted.
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