Not Vaccinating Your Kids Endangers Public Health

Not Vaccinating Your Kids Endangers Public Health

A pediatrician gives a one-year-old child a vaccine.

(© sonar512/Fotolia)


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Daniel Salmon
Daniel Salmon is the Director of Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety. Before joining the Institute, Salmon was the Director of Vaccine Safety in the National Vaccine Program Office at the US Department of Health and Human Services. As director, he coordinated, evaluated and provided leadership for federal vaccine safety programs. During the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic, he oversaw the federal vaccine safety monitoring program—the most comprehensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in US history. Dr. Salmon’s primary research and practice interest is optimizing the prevention of childhood infectious diseases through the use of vaccines. He is broadly trained in vaccinology, with an emphasis in epidemiology, behavioral epidemiology, and health policy. Dr. Salmon’s focus has been on determining the individual and community risks of vaccine refusal, understanding factors that impact vaccine acceptance, evaluating and improving state laws providing exemptions to school immunization requirements, developing systems and science in vaccine safety, and effective vaccine risk communication.
This man spent over 70 years in an iron lung. What he was able to accomplish is amazing.

Paul Alexander spent more than 70 years confined to an iron lung after a polio infection left him paralyzed at age 6. Here, Alexander uses a mirror attached to the top of his iron lung to view his surroundings.

Allison Smith / The Guardian

It’s a sight we don’t normally see these days: A man lying prone in a big, metal tube with his head sticking out of one end. But it wasn’t so long ago that this sight was unfortunately much more common.

In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of people each year were infected by polio—a highly contagious virus that attacks nerves in the spinal cord and brainstem. Many people survived polio, but a small percentage of people who did were left permanently paralyzed from the virus, requiring support to help them breathe. This support, known as an “iron lung,” manually pulled oxygen in and out of a person’s lungs by changing the pressure inside the machine.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.

Savannah Salazar (left) and her mother, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar, who earned a PhD in neurobiology in the quest for a treatment of her daughter's seizure disorder.

LGS Foundation

Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.

“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.