Re-Emerging Diseases: Why Some Are Making a Comeback

Vaccine Refusal

One of the greatest public health achievements in history, vaccines are credited for the massive decline of potentially dangerous diseases like measles and polio. Although the majority of families embrace vaccination, a growing number appear to be delaying or forgoing vaccines altogether due to a misunderstanding of the safety, effectiveness, and necessity of vaccination.

In Texas, for example, the number of students with nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements has skyrocketed from just 10,404 in 2007 to 52,756 in 2017. While the overall vaccination rate for measles in Texas held fairly steady between 2007 and 2017 with a rate of about 97% for students, research shows that unvaccinated individuals tend to cluster in the same communities and schools, resulting in a breakdown of protective herd immunity and leaving those individuals vulnerable to outbreaks of disease.

In the case of Texas, more than 360 of the state's 1,745 independent school districts—or 21%—had measles vaccination rates below the 83% to 94% threshold recommended to achieve herd immunity, and at least five districts reported measles vaccination rates of 50% or less. If someone infected with measles were to enter those communities, the disease could spread like wildfire.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases. It was officially declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but since then, dozens of outbreaks and thousands of cases have been reported—including an outbreak involving Disneyland that led to more than 300 cases in the United States and Canada.

Unless the United States is able to increase vaccination rates in communities throughout the country, these outbreaks will likely continue.

Waning or Insufficient Immunity

Measles isn't the only vaccine-preventable disease seeing a resurgence. Cases of pertussis and mumps have also been on the rise, and while vaccine refusal is certainly a factor, there's another culprit potentially at play: insufficient or waning immunity.

Many of the individuals involved in recent outbreaks of mumps and pertussis have been at least partially vaccinated. Does that mean that the vaccine doesn't work? Not exactly.

Vaccines work by training your body to fight a particular pathogen, like a virus, bacteria, or toxin. The immune system creates antibodies to fight off the vaccine, and then stores away the info in case they come in contact with the disease in the future. It's a powerful tool, but it's not like flipping a switch. Vaccines don't guarantee immediate and lifelong immunity for everyone who gets them, and the same is true for wild infection of disease.

If the body isn’t exposed to the pathogen or vaccine again for a long time, the body can “forget” how to make the antibodies, and isn’t as able to adequately fight off an infection—even though the person was vaccinated. “Booster” shots can help keep the immune system primed and ready in case you come into contact with a wild form of the disease, but who and how often you need another dose of vaccine can vary.

Drug Resistance

Antibiotics used to be a magic bullet to cure a wide range of diseases. The discovery of penicillin in the late 1920s was a game-changer, as diseases that used to mean certain death suddenly became treatable. But just as humans have found ways to stave off disease, viruses and bacteria have been adapting, too.

Tuberculosis, for example, used to kill roughly one out of every seven people who got it. Effective diagnosis and treatment have led to a drop in incidence rates in the United States and globally, but that progress is threatened as drug-resistant tuberculosis continues to crop up around the world. Effective treatment is available, however; it is when treatment is not available that TB can be fatal.

And it's not the only one. Drug resistance has been seen with a number of diseases—some of them posing urgent threats to public health, including sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea. The reasons behind how resistance develops vary, but it all comes down to how and when these drugs are used.

Bacteria that cause illness can be thought of as being "bad" bacteria. Most of these bad bacteria will respond to antibiotics but some may be resistant. You also have "good" bacteria that help protect your body from the bad types. Antibiotics kill both the good and bad bacteria, but only the bad ones that respond to antibiotics. The resistant ones are left behind. Without good bacteria to keep them at bay, they can multiply, take over, and potentially spread from person to person or pass on their super-strength to other bacteria. In addition, taking antibiotics might lead some bad bacteria to mutate and become resistant to the medicine so that they can survive in your body.

One of the most important steps in combatting drug resistance is to change the way antibiotics are used and prescribed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as much as 50% of the time antibiotics are prescribed, they are prescribed incorrectly or in a way that's suboptimal—for example, prescribing antibiotics for what is really a viral infection, like the cold.

Misuse of antibiotics in food-producing animals can also lead to drug resistance of food-borne illnesses like salmonella in humans, and thus should only be used under the supervision and direction of a licensed veterinarian.

Climate Change

Perhaps the largest resurgence of disease is yet to come. With the rise in global temperatures, the earth is seeing changes in not only the environment, but also shifts in animal habitats and human interaction as extreme weather events—always a threat to human health and safety—become more frequent.

Scientists are cautioning that a warmer, wetter planet will lead to a resurgence of a number of diseases. Heavy rains and subsequent flooding, for example, can overwhelm drains and back up sewer lines, leading to the contamination of water supplies and outbreaks of diseases like cholera. Warmer temperatures and increases in precipitation are allowing tropical mosquito populations to creep ever-closer to the poles, risking a surge in vector-borne illnesses like malaria. And rising sea levels will likely displace whole communities and force them to move to increasingly urban spaces, where diseases can more easily spread.

When and where these events will happen is—at this point—largely theoretical due to the highly complex nature of disease transmission pathways. But health officials predict that the changing climate will likely, at the very least, exacerbate and expand current health issues, especially in areas that lack the infrastructure and resources to prepare and respond.

Flickers of that are already starting to appear. Dengue fever incidence has increased significantly in the past several decades, in part because of warmer temperatures and higher precipitation allowing its vector, the Aedes mosquito, to expand its habit. Reported cases of waterborne diarrheal diseases commonly seen following heavy precipitation—like legionella and cryptosporidium—have seen a rise in recent years, and warmer waters have made cholera-causing bacteria able to survive in areas they couldn't before. These increases might be only the beginning.

A Word From Verywell

The ebb and flow of disease incidence are highly complex and almost never due to a single, solitary cause. Examples given above are meant to illustrate how these specific factors are influencing disease trends, and aren't meant to represent an exhaustive explanation for why a particular disease is making a comeback. 

Additionally, while some of these pathogens are, indeed, showing signs of a resurgence, many more are conquered every day through large-scale and coordinated public health efforts. The significance of this success shouldn't be overlooked.