…is from a 2001 article, “Personal Hygiene and Life Expectancy Improvements Since 1850: Historic and Epidemiologic Associations”, appearing in the American Journal of Infection Control:
“Between 1850 and 1900, the commonly recurring epidemics of cholera, smallpox, malaria, and typhoid were gradually brought under control. During the next 50 years, gratifying victories over such endemic diseases as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, and scarlet fever were witnessed. These diseases were less dramatic than epidemics, but each was among the leading causes of death before 1900. By the middle of the 20th century, except for the 1918 influenza pandemic, death from infectious disease in Western industrialized countries was no longer a major component of mortality statistics.”
Vaccines have today been mythologized, and it is just assumed that they saved humanity from infectious disease. The historical record, never referred to by the acolytes and evangelists of the vaccine mythology, contradicts that assumption. Vaccines had nothing to do with the sudden, dramatic decline in infectious disease. The true cause of the decline was the enormous advances in hygiene and sanitation that occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The purification of public water supplies that was widely adopted after 1910 in the United States caused an immediate and dramatic decline in mortality rates of such waterborne diseases as diphtheria, typhoid fever, cholera, and others.
Yet the pushers of vaccine myths are not in pursuit of truth, but of power. The public mythologizing of vaccines serves an agenda, one that, in turn, serves industry, and the various agencies that protect it.
