Baltimore City Health Department issued the following announcement on Aug. 26.
There’s been a lot of questions about our “Disease Elimination Graphic” and we’d like to take a moment to issue some clarifications.
First- when we mentioned “babeosis”, we were discussing bovine babeosis, a disease affecting cattle, which was eliminated in the 1940s. That’s our bad- we should have used the scientific term Babesia bovis, as there are multiple types of Babesia.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/babesiosis/epi.html
Even the terms Disease “elimination” and “eradication” have specific meanings in public health, (and there’s some argument in some circles about those definitions), so let’s talk about that!
Disease eradication is “the permanent reduction to zero of the WORLDWIDE incidence of infection caused by a specific agent as a result of deliberate efforts.“.
Source: https://asm.org/.../Disease-Eradication-What-Does-It-Take...
It’s REALLY hard to do this. From the article above “to date, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared only 2 diseases officially eradicated:
Smallpox caused by variola virus (VARV) and
the Rinderpest virus (RPV), which infects cows, deer, and buffalo.”
Disease ELIMINATION, on the other hand, “does not require the permanent worldwide reduction of disease incidence to zero, but rather reducing incidence (which means new cases) to zero in a particular geographic area”.
Source: https://asm.org/.../Disease-Eradication-What-Does-It-Take...
For example, while malaria has been eliminated in the US, there are over 200 million cases of malaria in the world each year with hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Source: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria
We aren’t saying that these diseases don’t exist anymore and certainly don’t mean to minimize the experiences of people currently suffering any of these diseases - that was certainly not our intention.
What we ARE saying is that, while these diseases still exist, historically they were a LOT more common, and through WIDESPREAD campaigns, we have been able to severely reduce the burden of these diseases.
Moving a disease from levels affecting entire countries, to regional or even area specific outbreaks of disease is a big deal, like in the cases of measles, and rubella, which have been “eliminated”.
Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/rubella/about/in-the-us.html
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/elimination.html
Vaccinations work, and even though some diseases can actually be eradicated from the populations, (like smallpox!), others can be, through time and effort, be stomped out to former shell of themselves, affecting dozens or hundreds per year, as opposed to tens of thousands.
Vaccinations work, and even though some diseases can actually be eradicated from the populations, (like smallpox!), others can be, through time and effort, be stomped out to former shells of themselves, affecting dozens or hundreds per year, as opposed to tens of thousands.
Increasing our COVID-19 vaccine coverage will be one of the keys to getting us out of this pandemic, into a world where COVID-19 isn’t threatening the lives of so many around the world.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Baltimore City Health Department
Alerts Sign-up