Vaccines have accomplished near miracles in the fight against infectious disease. They have consigned smallpox to history and should soon do the same for polio. By the late 1990s an international campaign to immunize all the world's children against six devastating diseases was reportedly reaching 80 percent of infants (up from about 5 percent in the mid-1970s) and was reducing the annual death toll from those infections by roughly three million.

Yet these victories mask tragic gaps in delivery. The 20 percent of infants still missed by the six vaccines--against diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, tetanus and tuberculosis--account for about two million unnecessary deaths each year, especially in the most remote and impoverished parts of the globe. Upheavals in many developing nations now threaten to erode the advances of the recent past, and millions still die from infectious diseases for which immunizations are nonexistent, unreliable or too costly.

This article was originally published with the title Edible Vaccines.

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