Changes

Throughout the 19th century, in regions as diverse as England, India, and Nepal, formal vaccination programs were carried out. By 1807, over a million Indians and Sri Lankans were vaccinated for smallpox. In 1816, Sweden became the first country requiring vaccinations for children under the age of 2 for smallpox. In England, in 1853 compulsory vaccinations were passed in that year. In the United States, by the late 19th century and early 20th century, vaccination laws were developed throughout the country and by different states. Since 1906 in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has attempted to regulate drugs and vaccines, increasingly improving their scientific methodology for testing the efficacy of vaccines. For influenza, another major infectious disease, vaccines began much later as it was assumed for decades that the disease was bacterial. The virus for creating influenza strains was only formally noticed in the 1930s and it took Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Wilson Smith in 1935 to formally understand that antiobodies can be used to fight influenza. By the late 1930s, the first tested influenza vaccines were developed. Initially, they were tested on the military. It was not until 1945 that influenza vaccines for civilians were licensed, leading to formal campaigns to vaccinate populations to seasonal influenza. Increasingly, after this time, that many infectious disease could potentially be vaccinated against. By 1974, the World Health Organization (WHO) begins a global vaccination program. Their goal was to eradicate at least six common and infectious diseases in children, specifically: measles, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and tuberculosis. While in the 1970s and 1980s there was great optimism that such infectious diseases could be eradicated, it became clear that it was not so simple. Mainly, the WHO realized that public health programs had to be supported at the same time as inoculation campaigns. For instance, improving sanitation infrastructure helped to improve the spread of measles. For the common required vaccines in the United States, today vaccination rates vary between 82-99.6% among children.<ref>For more on vaccination development, see: Bazin, H., 2011. <i>Vaccination: a history</i>. J. Libbey Eurotext, Montrouge.</ref>