The history of vaccination and current vaccination policies in Korea

摘要

There may be many reasons for the significant decrease in the incidence of the pediatric infectiousdiseases in modern Korea; this could be due to the improvement of sanitary facilities, significantgrowth of Korean economy, improvement of nutrition, development and disseminationof antibiotics and implantation of vaccination, and overall improvement of medical technology.The development of vaccination has been highlighted as a striking achievement of the modernmedical sciences with new technologies in many fields of medicine. Since 1876, the methodfor vaccination has opened its new era by Suk-Young Jee, known as the Jenner in Korea whowrote a book about smallpox vaccination, and it led an opportunity to propagate the needs forthe vaccination in Korea. There was a time when pediatric wards were full of patients withparasitic diseases and many vaccine-preventable diseases such as diphtheria, pertussis,Japanese B encephalitis, and poliomyelitis in 1950s-1960s. We do not see those infectious diseasesthat often any more in recent years. However, we still have patients with water-bornediseases and other communicable diseases related to increasing international travels. We justexperienced the first pandemic influenza of the 21st century in 2009 and avian influenza is stilla threat to humans in other parts of the world with an unpredictable potential of pandemicity.In addition, we have tough battles with emerging antibiotic resistance in many strains ofbacteria and increased opportunistic infections due to improvement of medical technology involvingmore aggressive treatment modality and use of medical devices. Researches in manyareas are under way and we hope that some of them may be preventable and decreased witha development of new vaccines in the future.