All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

Time for another screed about the anti-vaccination movement.

Well, not about them per se, but rather about another study that demonstrates how much of a positive difference vaccines have made in the US. The article, from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, describes what I can only imagine to be a Herculean effort to digitize disease reporting records from 1888 to 2011 (article behind a paywall, unfortunately).  Turns out there are publications that have been collecting weekly reports of disease incidence across US cities for over a century.  I have not been able to access the methods, but I can’t shake the image of hordes of undergraduates hunched over yellowed clippings and blurry photocopies of 19th century tables, laboriously entering numbers one by one into a really extensive excel spreadsheet.

All told, 87,950,807 individual cases were entered into their database, including location, time, and diseases.  Not fun, however it was done. Continue reading →