Vaccine-preventable disease rates at a historic low

Childhood immunization is a success at reducing the rates of disease, hospitalizations, and death for many diseases-that's the finding of a study outlined in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 2007;298:2155).

Scientists performed a historical comparison of the period before national vaccination recommendations (prior to 1980) vs the 2006 number of reported cases on 13 diseases: diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, invasive Hib, acute hepatitis B, hepatitis A, varicella, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and smallpox.