This is a pop-up book about a very important topic: Vaccines. Vaccination is the most effective measure against preventable infectious diseases. Unfortunately, a lot of people are worried about possible side effects and too few are aware of the very serious consequences of supposedly ‘harmless’ diseases such as measles.

Here is a video of the pop-up book in action:

There is a longer version, too, where I explain a bit what’s going on on each page.

The book consists of 9 chapters, each discussing a specific facet of vaccines.  The first is an introduction to the pathogens that cause infectious diseases:

Next is an overview of how the immune system works:

Here is a history of vaccination, starting with smallpox inocculations by the Chinese about 1000 years ago, showing milestones by Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteuer, and ending with today’s return of measles due to vaccine fatigue.

Next is an overview of the distribution of infectious diseases worldwide:

… followed by a timeline of five important infectious diseases and their decline after vaccines had been introduced:

This leads to a discussion of herd immunity. Herd immunity is a concept where, if a large enough number of people in a population is immune to a disease due to vaccinations, the whole ‘herd’ is protected, including people who cannot be vaccinated (newborns, AIDS patients, etc):

This is a pie chart

It has a nice mechanism to fold the chart up when closing the page:

Some of the next steps in vaccine development: A vaccine for HIV and for malaria, as well as the complete eradication of polio:

And the future of vaccination: New delivery systems, DNA vaccines, vaccines against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and vaccines against cancer:

The book took about 45 hours in total to design and make. Of course, I made several iterations of each page, to make sure the mechanisms work smoothly. The following sources where used for the data presented in the book:

The immune system:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system

History of vaccines:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination
• http://www.historyofvaccines.org/

Infectious diseases across the globe:

• http://www.smartglobalhealth.org/issues/entry/infectious-diseases
• http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/

Infectious diseases time lines:

• http://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005978

Death toll of infectious diseases:

• https://www.research.olemiss.edu/UMQuest/2007/Winter/ThePowerOfPartnerships.html

I take on commissions for paper toys and paper engineering projects that explain scientific or technological problems, or for goodies and giveaways for life science and technology companies. If you are interested in having something like this custom-made, I’d be happy to hear from you via the contact form.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more details on what you can and cannot do with my work, see here.