QUESTION? What do polio, measles, whooping cough, and scurvy have in common?

ANSWER: They’re all making a comeback.

To the properly vaccinated and nourished masses, medical monstrosities of yore, like measles and scurvy, tend to be regarded as nebulous evils from another era. Thanks to dedicated public health efforts, the horrors of a once-pretty face now encrusted in a thick smear of boils clustered together like marshmallows in a trash compactor are but ghosts in an antique shop. Cerebrally intriguing, but nothing you’d expect to deal with in any practical way.

I regret to inform you that yours is a false sense of security. Take polio, for example: so tantalizingly close to global eradication, it continues to spread throughout Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, its resurgence a casualty of bitter political conflict. And those measles outbreaks, which are becoming commonplace as vaccination is vilified. Measles is part of the elaborate fraud of Andrew Wakefield, and a disease so serious that in 2011, nearly half of the children under five who contracted it had to be hospitalized. Not to mention pertussis—which is also enjoying the Wakefield boost—a devastating disease that is named for the "whooping" sound the body makes as lungs gasp for air after its characteristic violent coughing fits. Even scurvy, the killer of sailors and soldiers and the most Cronenbergian of the bunch, is rearing its forgotten head in the well-fed but malnourished.

Why are these diseases, once faded into obscurity like someone else’s family photos, creeping back into the news cycle? Modern medicine, for all of its sweeping successes, has inoculated society from the core sentiment that powered the work to bring us such relaxed complacency: fear.

Dear reader, I’d like to re-instill your respect for nature.

This project will be a four-part series, with one installment each for measles, whooping cough, polio, and scurvy, to be released weekly. I seek to examine the in-depth science behind these comeback killers, ripping the jargon out and chewing through the fascinating gore of molecular biology, virology, pathology, and epidemiology, all the while contextualizing the reality of these forgotten deaths within the sociopolitically charged atmospheres that have allowed their returns.

I’ll be digging through journals and talking to scientists, searching for first-hand accounts and pouring through photographs that capture the nightmares we’ve long forgotten. Each piece will be long form and immaculately fact checked. They will, as it happens, also be written without mercy.

Because those nightmares are coming back.

Because you’ve always been curious.

Because fuck your science textbook’s unreadable bilge.

This is probably going to hurt a little bit, but trust me, you’ll enjoy it.