Smoking causes cancer. It causes small cell and squamous cell cancers of the lung, including oral and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, gastrointestinal carcinoma, and cancers of half a dozen additional tissues. It is highly correlated with the second leading cause of death in the United States.

Quitting smoking reduces the possibility of having lung cancer by more than half. This information, however, is not a big surprise to most people. It is baffling that 1 in 5 Americans continues to smoke. Yet there is one behavior on the rise that is still more contrary to human health than smoking - and perhaps more inexplicable as well, as it cannot be explained away by chemical dependence, nor by social custom. I speak of the decision not to vaccinate one's children. There is a belief among these erring individuals that the ailments against which the Centers for Disease Control recommends we vaccinate are somehow less serious than we, as a society, have been led to believe.

Moreover, some people believe that due to outstanding modern medical science, most diseases would be easily treatable. Let us clarify this matter. Not long before it was eradicated by vaccination, the smallpox virus erased entire cultures on two continents, where fatality rates rose as high as 90%. For those who survived, it was a cause of permanent, often debilitating disfigurement. Before the HiB and DTaP vaccines, epiglottitis caused by Haemophilus influenza, and diphtheria caused by Corynebacterium diphtheria were both exceedingly common causes of death in young children, largely because they tended to develop rapidly and obstruct the airway. Death typically occurs well before medical attention can be accessed, and thus, despite all our modern medical advances, these diseases remain just as dire as they were two hundred years earlier. We could continue this list. In the past, for instance, rubella was the most common cause of congenital deafness, and mumps a major cause of sterility. Children who survived the measles, meanwhile, still run the risk of the virus re-emerging years later as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, frequently fatal infection of the brain. However, the point is clear.

Vaccination is neither a conspiracy nor merely a matter of modern convenience, nor is it entirely without risk. But vaccination, plainly put, is the only effective medical intervention to safeguard our children from some of the deadliest and most virulent diseases known to man.

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