Publisher Summary
This chapter presents a philosophical review of vaccination. Vaccination is the most successful medical and veterinary measure: More lives have been saved by immunization, more animal production safeguarded than through all other medical and veterinary activities combined. It has been possible to eradicate a disease worldwide (human smallpox), and attempts to reach the same goal for poliomyelitis and measles are viewed with optimism. But this optimism does not apply for diseases where the causative virus has a reservoir in the wild fauna (such as in the case of distemper and parvoviruses that occur in mustellids). Against these diseases vaccination will have to continue. Vaccines are being used long before the mechanisms of immune protection became known. Today the discipline of vaccinology has acquired proper scientific status as a interdisciplinary research area that emerged from microbiology and immunology. Because vaccines make money—for the veterinarian and as a corollary also for the pharmaceutical industry—money is being invested in vaccine research.