As a student I was made to watch a series of history video that always opened with the statement "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it". I find this to a particularly troublesome epidemic in America currently. After the Great Depression we limited the speculative power of banks to prevent another depression. By the end of the nineties we had repealed a good portion of these protections and within a decade we had experienced the worst economic down turn since the Great Depression.
Similarly before 1963 thousands of people died every year of measles. Given the recent fear over vaccinations causing autism, which has been proven false, less parents are getting their kids the vaccinations for measles. Expect an uptick in measles deaths worldwide and eventually the fear of measles will outweigh the unfounded fear of the vaccine to prevent measles and parents will again return to the vaccinations that they should have been doing all along. If people understood the history of disease they would realize that the risk of not vaccinating is far greater than vaccinating. Unfortunately Americans will continue to make the same mistakes because they don't understand history. And the vaccine scare will not be the last example of this.
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