The last 100 years have seen major changes in the way medical care is delivered to newborns and infants. With the advent of antibiotics, sterile surgical procedures and space-age technology, infant mortality has plummeted. Diseases such as smallpox, polio and measles used to be the cause of thousands of infant and toddler deaths a year. But now, these deadly illnesses are just distant memories, their demise brought about by the widespread use of vaccines.

Yet as we enter the 21st century, some parents are questioning whether or not vaccines themselves are harmful to their children, leading to a very active, and even at times, acrimonious, debate.

It has been more than 200 years since a British physician, Edward Jenner, introduced vaccines to Western medicine. Ever since Jenner's work, his proponents have touted vaccines as a way to rid diseases in an essentially risk-free manner.

They point to the demise of most childhood illnesses as proof of the power of vaccines. It is a rare case indeed to hear of an infant or child coming down with illness such as measles, mumps or diphtheria. Most doctors graduating from a pediatric residency nowadays have only seen these illnesses in textbooks. With the advent of new vaccines against such diseases as chickenpox, parents can expect that their infants will face even fewer of the once common, and sometimes deadly, childhood illnesses than they themselves did.

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