After students have read On Guard and Mimicking Infection you may want stimulate discussion of the questions posed after Reading 4

• How are vaccinations similar to contracting the actual disease in establishing immunity to the disease? How do they differ? (They are similar in the way they activate the immune response and produce long term protection through memory B cells

  They are similar in the way they activate the immune response and produce long term protection through memory B cells. They differ in that the pathogen causes a disease and the vaccine does not.

• Which do you think is preferable, contracting the disease or being vaccinated? Explain your response.

  Answers will vary. This question may generate discussion about the safety of vaccines and bring up student concerns. This issue is addressed in greater depth in Module 3 – Viruses Go “Viral”.

• The eradication of smallpox by vaccination was achieved through worldwide vaccination programs and also because smallpox virus has no animal reservoir. In Reading 1 you learned that polio has been eliminated from many countries but not eradicated from Earth. What other viral diseases could be candidates for eradication? Which would not be candidates?

  Eradication of a disease requires an effective vaccine for that disease and no animal reservoir that would harbor the virus. Provided students had experienced Module 1, they should recognize that measles would be a good candidate since an effective vaccine is available and no reservoir host exists. Other candidates for eradication include measles, chicken pox, mumps and rubella.

  Ebola would not be a good candidate since there is no vaccine and bats provide a reservoir host. SARS and Zika are also not candidates since they have animal reservoirs and no effective exists to date. You may want to have students do further research on this question.