Not only are officials seeing increases in disease outbreaks and deaths globally, but they are also witnessing the widespread growth of multi-resistant strains of organisms. Controversies about vaccine use launched on the Internet, raised in the media and spoken about in state legislatures around the country, coupled with the public's now abstract concept of diseases that threatened children only a generation ago, have begun to erode the public's trust in immunizations, he said. In some ways, immunization has become a victim of its own success. Once immunization prevents a disease that was once common, many tend to forget about the seriousness of what the disease caused.
Nothing can be further from the truth about the world's biggest single infectious killer.
Already 50 million people are believed to be infected by MDR-TB, with treatment being significantly more difficult and costing up to 100 times as much as a regular TB patient. It is also important to make the public aware of the continued health risks that the disease poses. Even though the number of TB cases has declined in the United States over the past six years, TB is still the number one single infectious disease killer worldwide, taking nearly 3 million lives each year. The Forgotten Epidemic Genital herpes affects 1.3 to 1.4 million people every year in the United States, yet little attention is given to this common sexually transmitted disease. Davis said one answer was the public's focus on the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.