Dr. Jayne Donegan discusses childhood illnesses and asks whether we should encourage and support children through these infections to build a healthy immune system
We vaccinate against lots of childhood diseases now because we are told that having the diseases is a bad thing and leads to thousands of deaths.
However, when we look at the figures from the Office for National Statistics, we see that 95% of the people who used to die from measles stopped dying before the vaccine was introduced in 1968, and similarly 99% of the people who used to die of whooping cough stopped before advent of the vaccination.
The mortality rate for tuberculosis fell by exactly the same amount in countries whether they did or didn't adopt the BCG vaccine. Scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and typhus were deadly killers. They all disappeared without a vaccine. Why?
