Sanitation, Nutrition, and Clean Water
Barbara O’Neill reminds us that infectious diseases like measles and diphtheria declined sharply before vaccines, thanks to sanitation, nutrition, and clean water.
Pioneers like Florence Nightingale emphasized hygiene. In early 20th-century London, sewage polluted the Thames, the city’s drinking source, breeding infections amid open waste.
Once sewage systems and clean water arrived, epidemics vanished—even in unvaccinated groups today. O’Neill says proper nutrition and hygiene, not injections, ended the “plagues of the past.”