[extropy-chat] Are vaccinations useless?

[BillK]

On 3/16/06, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> Wikipedia has quaranting practices in the 1200s, and maybe before if you go
> back to putting bells on lepers.  Whether the practices were effective I'm not
> sure, but if avoidance and isolation behavior work you wouldn't need germ
> theory to evolve them.
>
> OTOH, we don't put red dots on the foreheads of people with HIV or herpes or
> what not, to tell people not to have sex with them unless they themselves have
> the dot.  So one could argue quarantine still isn't common, but used fitfully.
>

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/quarantine.html>

In the mid-20th century, the advent of antibiotics and routine
vaccinations made large-scale quarantines a thing of the past, but
today bioterrorism and newly emergent diseases like SARS threaten to
resurrect the age-old custom, potentially on the scale of entire
cities.

BillK