Most vaccine-preventable diseases are spread from person to person, which means that if one person in a community gets an infectious disease, they can spread it to others. The best way to help stop the spread of certain diseases is through vaccination. If enough people are vaccinated there are fewer chances for a vaccine-preventable disease to spread, keeping everyone healthier.
Understanding Respiratory Viruses
Infectious respiratory diseases such as influenza, COVID-19, and RSV spread from person to person. Learn how your body fights back against these pathogens and some of the common side effects that you may experience as your immune system attacks.
How Vaccines Work
There are several kinds of vaccines. Some contain the same germs that cause disease; however the germs have been weakened or deadened. Others contain either a harmless part of the germ or its genetic material (such as the synthetic messenger RNA used for some COVID-19 vaccines).
A vaccine stimulates your immune system so that you produce the same antibodies you would make if you were exposed to the real disease. It helps your body learn to recognize and fight an invasion of a particular germ. Thus, you get to develop immunity to that disease without having to get the disease first.
Vaccines Prevent Respiratory Diseases
What Respiratory Diseases Have Vaccines?
There are vaccines for some infectious respiratory diseases, including:
Some infectious respiratory diseases do not yet have a vaccine, including:
Talk to your doctor to see if you are up to date on your vaccinations. It’s always better to prevent a disease rather than treat it after it occurs.
Reduce Your Risk for the Flu
In addition, you can find locations offering flu shots near you—and transportation if you need it—by visiting My-Flu-Shot.com for more information.
A History of Vaccines
Vaccines have a long and impressive history. Well before we understood how infections worked, in the late 1700s an English physician Edward Jenner learned that giving small amounts of infected material from smallpox victims to others provided them protection from the dreaded disease. It was from those learnings that he developed a smallpox vaccine saving countless lives and small-pox has now been eradicated worldwide. Since that first vaccine was developed in 1798, we have used that same principle to produce vaccines to almost eliminate many of the formerly deadly childhood infectious diseases from the U.S. In fact, the greatest vaccine success in the modern era has been the near worldwide elimination of polio.
But it’s not always that simple. Try as we might, we have not yet been able to develop successful vaccines to control other important worldwide infections, such as tuberculosis (TB), malaria and HIV. In addition, controlling influenza also remains a challenge requiring new vaccines each flu season. Most recently, scientists are working tirelessly to create additional vaccines to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.
How Vaccines Are Approved
Vaccine and new drug testing are overseen by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are done in a similar way.
Learn more by searching for recent vaccine topics covered in our Each Breath blog.
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Page last updated: April 17, 2024
