Vaccine Safety

Frequently Asked Questions

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Why do we need vaccines if we have better hygiene and sanitation to help prevent disease in Canada?

Answer: Better living conditions have been important in controlling some kinds of infectious diseases, such as diseases spread by dirty water. For the specific diseases that vaccines can prevent, however, disease rates only began to drop dramatically after the vaccines for those diseases were licensed and came into widespread use:

• Measles vaccine was first approved in Canada in 1963. Sanitation and living conditions in Canada have not changed greatly since that time. Before immunization, almost everyone got measles. For many children, the disease was serious: about 5,000 were hospitalized every year, and 50 to 75 children died. Today, because the vaccine is in wide use, there are few cases of measles in all of North and South America, including communities where living conditions are much poorer than in Canada.
• Meningitis (infection around the brain) and other severe infections due to Hib were common until just a few years ago. About one in every 300 Canadian children developed Hib disease by age 5. About 100 infants died each year from Hib meningitis, and many more suffered brain damage or deafness. Immunization against Hib became routine in the early 1990s. Since then, Hib disease has almost disappeared in Canada, from about 2,000 cases a year to less than four cases in the year 2000. Sanitation is no better now than it was in 1990, so it is hard to credit anything but the widespread use of Hib vaccine for this dramatic improvement.
• Many children in Canada still get very sick from pertussis (whooping cough) each year, and every year one child dies from this disease. Nearly all of the children affected got the disease because they were not immunized against pertussis.

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