Epilogue

This epilogue discusses that by the end of the socialist period in 1978, a new generation of immunologists and bacteriologists was beginning to rise to prominence, although the Cultural Revolution had broadly impeded and delayed education in this field. Many founding figures in modern Chinese immunology were by this time retired or dead. Despite the erosion of many programs that had delivered vaccines and other health services to large rural populations, mass immunization has continued after the economic reforms of the 1980s as a mandatory, regular practice of childhood health in China. A baby born in the People's Republic of China, much like their counterparts in the United States and Europe, is given a battery of mandatory shots by the age of two that provides protection against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, and other illnesses—and including the BCG and oral polio vaccines. These vaccinations are administered against a backdrop of growing environmental crisis and rising pharmaceutical safety concerns. By 2010, however, cancer, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses replaced infectious diseases as the primary causes of death. China's twentieth century thus saw a remarkable transformation in causes and scales of mortality. The establishment of a universal, mandatory immunization system in the mid-twentieth century helped make that transformation, and its surveillance, possible.