By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News

While August is National Immunization Awareness Month, many people are so used to getting those shots that they forget what life was like before they were available.

Linda Rhodes, health education and marketing director for the Livingston County Public Health Department, explained that instances of illness and lives saved just in the last few decades show the importance of immunizations.

“We just look at the people born in the last 20 year period, say from ’94 to 2013. The estimate is that we’ve avoided over 322 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations, and actually over 700,000 deaths that would have happened, had these people not been immunized,” Rhodes said.

For more information, call the health department at 844-7174.