Published 27 November 2013
In a paper published November 28, 2013, in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Contagious diseases in the United States from 1888 to the Present", Project Tycho™ authors describe how U.S. disease surveillance data have been used to estimate that over 100 million cases have been prevented by vaccination programs against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough). Vaccination programs against these diseases have been in place for over decades but epidemics continue to occur. Despite the availability of a pertussis vaccine since the 1920s, the largest pertussis epidemic in the U.S. since 1959 occurred last year. This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and all data used for this study have been released through the online Project Tycho™ data system (www.tycho.pitt.edu). "Historical records are a precious yet undervalued resource. As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, we live forward but understand backward," explained Dr. Donald Burke, senior author on the paper. "By 'rescuing' these historical disease data and combining them into a single, open-access, computable system, we can now better understand the devastating impact of epidemic diseases, and the remarkable value of vaccines in preventing illness and death."