Vaccines and Herd Immunity: Introduction
Vaccines are methods of preventing disease through the use of inoculation. People are exposed to small or weakened versions of a disease so that their immune system is prepared for when they are exposed to a real strain of the disease. They have been proven to prevent many devastating diseases, but people with weakened immune systems may not be able to get vaccines because their immune system may not even be able to fight off the weakened version. Specifically, infants, old people, and people with immune system diseases may not be able get vaccines. So what happens if you can’t get a vaccine?
Thanks to herd immunity, nothing will happen. Herd immunity is immunity that is given to people who are surrounded by immune people but don’t necessarily have that immunity. When a disease spreads through human contact and most of a community is immune to a disease, it will not be able to spread through that community to the few people who aren’t immune. Unfortunately, this herd immunity is threatened by people who refuse to vaccinate despite being completely able to. This leads to outbreaks of diseases thought to be eliminated, for example, measles. This project will model the spread of measles through a small town. The purpose of this project is to observe how herd immunity works, and how decreasing the amount of people vaccinated affects this herd immunity. It will also observe the effect of another factor, geographic barriers.