Diseases Of The Past: Gone Or Just Forgotten?

If you are over the age of 40, you probably have a smallpox vaccination scar.

The disease was officially eradicated in the United States and after 1972 smallpox vaccination was no longer mandated for the general public.

Smallpox no longer exists naturally in the world; America’s last case was in 1949 and the last known case in the world was in Somalia in 1977.

A number of other diseases of the past are still with us, however, and at least one is enjoying a resurgence.

Outbreaks and Epidemics

Plague, yellow fever, diphtheria and whooping cough once caused devastating epidemics in America and other parts of the world. Plague, also called the Black Death, killed about one-third of Europe’s population in the 1300s.

Smallpox, to which the indigenous peoples of North and South America had little or no immunity, may have killed millions of the earliest inhabitants, once Europeans landed on the continents.

Yellow fever outbreaks in the late 1700s may have killed as much as a tenth of the population of Philadelphia, and the disease was once considered the scourge of America’s port cities.

Causes Of Disease

The diseases of the past had a number of different causes. Plague is transmitted by a bacteria found in rats and the fleas that infest them. Yellow fever is a viral disease, transmitted by mosquitoes.

Smallpox is another viral disease, spread by direct contact with an infected person. Diphtheria and whooping cough are bacterial diseases, spread, like the common cold, through droplets produced when an infected person sneezes or coughs.

Eliminating Diseases Of The Past

Eradicating the diseases of the past required action on a number of fronts. In the case of smallpox, vaccination was the solution to the problem.

Better sanitation, housing and pest management dramatically decreased plague outbreaks, although there is still a reservoir of the disease in the wild. Antibiotics can be used to cure bacterial diseases such as plague.

Mosquito control and reclamation of swamplands have been responsible for the decline in yellow fever.

Diphtheria victims can be helped with diphtheria antitoxin and whooping cough responds to antibiotics if they are administered early in the course of the disease.

Current Status

Although the risk of contracting these diseases of the past is low, they do still occur in America.

Smallpox viruses are still stored in some government laboratories, and if they should be improperly disposed of or deliberately used in terrorist activity, many younger people would be at risk since they have not been vaccinated.

There have been a few cases of plague reported in the U.S. in recent years; Oregon reported a case in 2010 and another in 2012.

Yellow fever still exists in parts of South America and Africa, and anyone traveling to areas where it exists should receive a yellow fever vaccine.

It is possible the disease could be eradicated if the populations in the infested areas could be vaccinated, but lack of funds and infrastructure has so far prevented this.

Diphtheria is rare in most parts of the world and fewer than five cases a year usually occur in the United States.

Whooping cough, on the other hand, is on the rise, with over 18,000 cases reported in the United States as of July 2012.

The resurgence may be due to a decreased immunity among those who have been previously vaccinated, as well as an increase in unvaccinated children.