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|title=The End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease

|sort=End of Plagues: Global Battle Against Infectious Disease, The

|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan

|date=October 2013

|summary=World-leading immunologist John Rhodes chronicles the past, outlines the present, and makes suppositions about the future of vaccination in the mission of ending plagues.

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In ''The End of Plagues'', the remarkably clear voice of immunologist John Rhodes takes one through significant moments in man’s battle against infectious diseases. The artillery on which Rhodes focuses is that of the vaccine, which has taken us further away from the extreme grip infections once had on the course of history. The book starts with the example of smallpox, for which Edward Jenner first made a vaccine, having been in a world where variolation was on the rise. Between Jenner’s first serum transfer – from an immune milkmaid to a servant’s son – and the present day, several vaccines have been developed against ailments such as measles, various influenzas, and polio.

Jenner, who involved himself very much in getting the smallpox vaccine around in his native county of Gloucestershire, did not live to see his (somewhat modified) brainchild facilitate the eradication of smallpox from the face of the earth. The end of this plague is one which today inspires hope in the campaigners who travel to the ends of the earth with various vaccines. Vaccination is given in combination with surveillance containment of the target disease itself, at the behest of bigger and bigger bodies that are doing everything they can to recruit as many vaccinators and resources as possible. In the last pages of the book, Rhodes leaves behind the looming, dark clouds of continued refusal and avoidance of vaccination, and the creation of potential bio-weapons (consisting of the existing reservoirs of smallpox in a handful of countries). Instead, he expresses a wish to be able to tell Jenner the following concerning a plague poised to become the second one to be vanquished: ''the name of the last person in history to be naturally infected with polio''.

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