Without vaccines, epidemics of many preventable diseases could return, resulting in increased and unnecessary illness, disability, and death. The following vaccine-preventable diseases, not long ago, disabled and killed millions of American children. Thanks to our country s high childhood immunization coverage levels, these diseases are now very uncommon. However, the viruses and bacteria that cause vaccine-preventable disease and death still exist and can be passed on to people who are not protected by vaccines. Vaccine-preventable diseases have a costly impact, resulting in doctor's visits, hospitalizations, and premature deaths.
Sick children can also cause parents to lose time from work.
It's true that vaccination has enabled us to reduce most vaccine-preventable diseases to very low levels in the United States. However, some of them are still quite prevalent, even epidemic, in other parts of the world. Travelers can unknowingly bring these diseases into the United States, and if we were not protected by vaccinations these diseases could quickly spread throughout the population, causing epidemics here. At the same time, the relatively few cases we currently have in the U.S. could very quickly become tens or hundreds of thousands of cases without the protection we get from vaccines. We should still be vaccinated, then, for two reasons.