I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.
It did not seem likely that I was destined to undertake research on typhus.
Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.
I finally demonstrated that typhus infection is not hereditary in the louse.
Vaccinations absolutely work, and have dramatically decreased rates of childhood diseases.
Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases.
I think that the discoveries of antibiotics and vaccines have contributed to the improvement of the quality of life, making it possible to prevent contagious diseases.
Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.
I contracted malaria in rural Mozambique. I was a youth ambassador for Australia. For a year after high school, you give positive speeches about Australia and as part of it I traveled to lots of different countries.
Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history.