You Seldom See Them On The Cover Of Prevention magazine, but vaccines are the great prevention success story of modern medicine. They are not perceived as new or sexy; they have been around since the days of George Washington, when Edward Jenner first scraped the scabs from milkmaids infected with cow-pox to inoculate people against smallpox. By the end of the 20th century, vaccines had conquered many of man's most dreaded plagues, eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world. Vaccines had done their work so well, in fact, that in the context of 21st century medicine, with its smart drugs and high-tech interventions, they seemed almost quaint and out of date, a kind of biomedical backwater.
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