To accompany ‘2025’s Texas measles outbreak is a lesson in the value of vaccines’

SCIENCE

Before Reading:

1. Is vaccine technology very helpful, a little helpful or not at all helpful to humans today? Briefly explain your reasoning.
2. Vaccines train a person’s immune system to have greater resistance against a disease. Besides a vaccine, what is another way a person might develop resistance or immunity against a particular disease? What risks would be associated with developing immunity through this route?  

During Reading:

1. Besides measles, list five diseases that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that kids be vaccinated against.
2. What year was the measles vaccine made available to the public?
3. Aditya Gaur worked as a pediatrician in India before coming to the United States. What observation did he make regarding the frequency of polio, tetanus and other infections in India versus in the United States? How does Gaur explain this difference?
4. How do vaccines reduce someone’s chance of getting a disease? What role do antigens play in this process?
5. Explain the concept of herd immunity. For measles, what percentage of a population must be vaccinated in order for this kind of protection to take effect?
6. How many human lives are estimated to have been saved since the mid-1970s by vaccines against 14 infectious diseases?
7. Give an example of how vaccines have reduced rates of a type of cancer.
8. Vaccines often have fewer side effects than medicines given to treat disease. Describe a reason why.
9. Give one reason that babies are at greater risk of death from pertussis — or whooping cough — than adults.
10. COVID-19 vaccines drew criticism after studies showed that some young people may be more likely to develop a certain side effect than older people. Summarize why government officials concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the low risks.

After Reading:

1. Refer to your answer to Question 1 in Before Reading. After reading this story, has your view on vaccines changed or remained the same? Point to information from this story to explain why this story (a) changed your view or (b) reinforced your previous view.
2. People develop technology to solve problems in their lives. When a solution is successful, it allows later populations to avoid challenges that may have been common for past populations. It can be hard to imagine what it would be like to deal with problems we no longer face today. Smallpox is one example. Before vaccine technology, one smallpox strain — called variola major today — killed between 20 and 45 percent of the people it infected. Imagine you live in a time before vaccines. You receive news of a deadly smallpox outbreak in a nearby village. How would you feel about hearing this news? Soon, people around you start becoming sick, including some of your family and friends.

   Now imagine someone from the future time-traveled to you and told you about vaccine technology. The person goes on to say that people of the future use vaccines regularly, and no one gets smallpox anymore. How would you react to this knowledge? If you had access to such technology, would you use it? Imagine this futuristic person saying that they don’t feel that vaccines benefit them personally because people don’t get sick as much as they did in the past. How might the experience of living through a deadly outbreak give someone a different perspective on the value of vaccines?