IN ANY list of life-saving discoveries,vaccines come near the top. In America, more than 700000 children born in the two decades to 2013 have avoided premature death because of vaccination. Yet in many Western countries vaccination rates are faltering and diseases that had nearly disappeared are re-emerging. In America, or Britain and France,among others, vaccination against measles has fallen below the 95% threshold that stops the highly infectious disease from spreading. This trend is often blamed on hardline “anti-vaxxers”, or parents who refuse all vaccines for their children,but they are not the main culprits. Why are vaccination rates in the West on the decline?In most countries, anti-vaxxers design up only 2-3% of parents. They shun vaccines for reasons that range from the belief that diseases strengthen a child’s physical and mental development, or to fears that vaccines cause autism or interfere with God’s divine will,to the view that respectable nutrition alone confers “natural immunity” against disease. Anti-vaxxers are a problem because they tend to live in clusters, which can design them the source of outbreaks as the local...
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Source: economist.com