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Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Ronevich.

Step inside and get briefed this week on whether it would be a good idea to make some vaccinations compulsory.

But before we start, if you enjoy this podcast, tell a friend or write a review in the mystic realms of

podcast providers. They're the magic dust which help us climb the rankings and help other listeners

find us. But enough with the charity appeal. Let's get on with this week's show.

Measles is an entirely preventable disease, says the UN, and for a while we and other developed countries had prevented it through mass vaccination.

But during the first three months of this year, the World Health Organization reported 112,000 cases of measles.

Over the same time last year, it was 28,000.

Here in the UK, we once again have outbreaks of measles and falling vaccination rates.

Today in the briefing room, I want to know why this is, how much it matters,

and whether, as the Health Secretary has said recently,

we should rule nothing out, even including compulsory vaccination.

Step inside and we'll find out.

First, some context is needed.

Gareth Williams, a medical historian, is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Bristol,

an author of Angel of Death, The Story of Smallpox.

Gareth Williams, how when did the first vaccinations come about?

The first vaccinations were put on the map by a man called Edward Jenner,

and he did his great work on vaccination in the late 1790s.

What Jenner did, to begin with, was follow up a legend that is supposed to trickled up from the farming community. That if you worked with cows, you caught cowpox, you got over it, because it was essentially never fatal.

And then the miraculous thing which people had noticed was that people had gone through that process could not catch smallpox.

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