Immunizations

Immunization Trivia

The first Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded in 1901 to the scientist who developed the first antitoxin for diphtheria.

The “March of Dimes” began in 1938 as a fund-raising campaign for polio. People were asked to mail one dime directly to the White House to help fight the disease. In the first three days, the White House received 230,000 dimes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose profile is now on the dime, was paralyzed by polio.

The reason varicella is called chickenpox has nothing to do with chickens. It got its name because its blisters look like chick peas.

The last person in the world to get a natural case of smallpox was a 23-year-old cook in Somalia, in 1977. In recent years he has made public appearances to help with Somalia’s polio eradication campaign.

Although it is called Haemophilus influenzae, Hib is not related to influenza (flu). Hib was first discovered in people who died from influenza during the 1889 pandemic, and was mistakenly believed to be the cause of that disease.

Mumps is considered mainly a childhood disease. But it used to be known as a disease afflicting armies. Mumps was one of the leading causes of hospitalization during World War I.

In 1970, astronaut Ken Mattingly was scrubbed from the Apollo XIII moon mission because he was exposed to measles.

During World War I, German measles (rubella) was referred to as “Liberty Measles.”

The famous dog-sled race, the Iditarod, commemorates a dog-sled run in 1925 to rush serum to Nome, Alaska to treat an epidemic of diphtheria.

About one-fourth of the U.S. population, including President Woodrow Wilson, got influenza during the 1918 pandemic.

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 - November 11, 1938), also known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the United States to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. She is known to have infected 53 people - three of whom died from the disease. The human carrier is usually a healthy person who has survived a previous episode of typhoid fever but in whom the typhoid bacteria have been able to survive without causing further symptoms.