Turning 30 is a major milestone.

For many it means that you're no longer in the hard-partying, bad decision-making stage of your life, for better or for worse.

Before you turn the big 3-0 (or even if you already have), here are 30 things you should do, from adrenaline-pumping activities to experiences that help you grow.

Additional reporting by Julie Zeveloff.

Travel somewhere TRULY exotic — anywhere that feels like the end of the earth.

Run a half marathon (it’s okay if you have to walk a little).

Buy tickets to a music festival and rage with the best of them.

See the 11 music festivals you can't miss this summer here

Attraction relies on much more than your physical appearance. 

It's in the way you carry yourself, the people you hang out with, and how you talk to people — plus a whole lot more.

Be funny.

Multiplestudiesindicate that women are more attracted to men who can make them laugh. 

In one study, a psychologist asked men to tell a joke to their friends at a bar while a woman sat at a nearby table — and the guys who told jokes were three times as likely to get her number as the people who didn't.

"The effect of a great sense of humor on women's attractions might be partially explained by the fact that funny people are considered to be more social and more intelligent, things that women seek in a mate,"anthropologist Gil Greengross writes.

Surround yourself with friends.

A 2014 study from the University of California at San Diego found that people looked better when they were in a group. 

It's because our brains take the faces of a group of people in aggregate, making each face look more "average"— and attractive — as a result. 

"Having a few wingmen or wingwomen may indeed be a good dating strategy, particularly if their facial features complement and average out one's unattractive idiosyncrasies," authors Drew Walker and Edward Vul write.

Skip the small talk.

In a 1997 study, State University of New York psychologist Arthur Aron separated two groups of people and paired them off, giving each duo 45 minutes to answer a set of questions. 

One question set was small talk, and the other was increasingly probing. The people who asked deeper questions felt more connected — and one couple fell in love.

According to Harvard research, talking about yourself stimulates the same brain regions as sex or a good meal. 

"Activation of this system when discussing the self suggests that self-disclosure ... may be inherently pleasurable," Scientific American reports. 

A well-known secret for locals, the Hintertux Glacier in Austria offers winter sports fanatics the chance to ski and snowboard 365 days a year. 

Located in the world-famous Alps, the glacier is a favorite for national ski teams and professional boarders thanks to its wide variety of lift-serviced slopes and the highest World Cup half-pipe in Europe. 

Hintertux Glacier is able to stay cold throughout the year because of the massive amount of snow it gets in the winter and its elevation of 10,000 feet. In the summer, it offers at least 10 to 18 km of ski terrain and up to 10 running lifts, making it the only place in Austria for year-round winter activities.  

But besides its runs, Hintertux Glacier also offers stunning panoramic views of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, and access to Nature's Ice Palace, a glacial crevasse filled with ice stalactites, crystallized ice formations, frozen waterfalls, and a glacial lake.

Nature's Ice Palace remains at a constant temperature  of 0° degrees, allowing it to stay open to the pubic 365 days of the year. 

To ensure safety, Nature's Ice Palace requires you to have a tour guide. Tours are typically either 16 euros for an hour, or 8 euros for 30 minutes.  

Hintertux Glacier is accessible via lifts that are 15 minutes walking distance from the Hintertux village and is open from 8am to 4:30pm. Prices vary depending on the season and time of the day you go. 

SEE ALSO: The only way to see this incredible museum in Mexico is by scuba diving

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If any city knows how to have a good time on a shoestring, it's Berlin.

Once deemed "poor but sexy" by its own mayor, the German capital possesses a carefree spirit that has made it a natural magnet for artists, entrepreneurs, and creative industries alike.

As one of the most exciting and rapidly growing destinations in Europe, we've picked out some of the best activities for which limited budgets are no obstacle.

Covering over 35 markets, Daily Secret's signature content (email newsletters and website) reveals coveted bars, restaurants, shops and all round local 'secrets' while integrating brands around passion points.

1. Soak up some culture on a gallery crawl.

One of Berlin's defining features is undoubtedly its thriving and ever-expanding gallery scene.

While admission to state museums and institutions can verge on the costly, a trip to one of the many independent spaces will prove a far cheaper — and often more satisfying — alternative.

Lively clusters of galleries appear all over town, but we especially recommend a trip to Potsdamer Strasse and the surrounding streets in Schöneberg, where young and established spaces exist side by side.

Openings are often timed to coincide with one another, so check local art listings INDEX as a guide to the most happening evenings, or refer to this handy map.

If you're very lucky, you might just score yourself a free wine in the process.

Postdamer Strasse: Kurfürsenstrasse U-Bahn

Price: Free

2. Seize your 5 minutes of fame at Mauerpark Karaoke.

Housing one of the most popular outdoor flea markets in Berlin, Maurpark attracts hordes of visitors every Sunday for its mad mix of stalls and, more unusually, its "bearpit karaoke."

Since early 2009, charismatic MC Joe Hatchiban and his battery-powered karaoke kit have taken to the park’s 1,500 capacity amphitheater to host wildly successful sing-along sessions.

From crooning older locals to break-dancing kids, the diversity of brave participants and their excitable audience make for an afternoon of top-class entertainment.

Gleimstrasse 55, 10437 Berlin

Price: Free

3. Tour the city on the 100 bus.

Navigate the city like a pro while sparing yourself the pricey, tourist-trapping coach tours with a top-deck ride on one of the city's standard double-decker buses.

Single tickets cost just 2.70 euros and last two hours, with the option of getting on and off at any point within that time.

The iconic 100 bus route passes by the Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Museum Island, the Fernsehturm (TV Tower), Berlin Zoo, and the Victory Column.

Hop off at cultural institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt to check out its impressive sci-fi design by architect Hugh Stubbins.

Find the bus route here.

Price: From 1,60€ (~$1.79) for a 6-stop ride

Instagram has incredible reach with over 300 million monthly active users.

But that also means one mistake could go a long way.

Like these 12 people who got fired or suspended over their Instagram posts.

A day care worker was fired for making fun of a baby

Melissa Jordan couldn’t believe what she saw when she randomly came across her son’s photo on Instagram.

It was a photo of her baby son sitting on a high chair, looking distressed, at his day care center. Her son has delayed speech development.

The caption read: “He is thinking cuz sure can’t talk. Lmao.”

Under the same account, another photo making fun of a baby with protruded teeth was found. One of the captions read, "I'm sick of this s***!!!"

Buzzfeed reports that the photos were posted by a woman who worked at the day care center. Soon, the center fired her, and her Instagram account was taken down.

A restaurant manager was put on indefinite leave after posteingracial slurs and photos of receipts with low tips

The manager of a Delaware restaurant called Padi was put on indefinite leave after an Instagram account associated with him was found to have posted multiple posts degrading its customers.

One of the posts had a photo of a receipt with racial slurs: "What do you expect from a last name like that? Sand ni****s will never change #cheap #jew," according to The Delaware News Journal. The same Instagram account had similar photos with caption that basically had similar racially offensive comments.

Although the manager denied he was behind any of the posts, he was put on indefinite unpaid leave. The owner of the restaurant, who happens to be the man's uncle, said he believes other people may have been involved.

Subway workers were fired over gross photos of freezing pee

Two Subway employees were fired for posting insensitive photos defiling food and freezing pee at the restaurant on their Instagram accounts, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

One of the photos showed former employee Ian Jett putting his penis on the sandwich bread with the caption, "My name is @ianjett and I will be your sandwich artist today."

Another photo showed a frozen plastic bottle filled with urine, including the caption, "Today at work I froze my pee."

The photos were posted on the account held under another Subway employee, Cameron Boggs.

Both were fired as soon as Subway found out about the photos.

Preparing for a big interview can be tough, but it always helps to look over popular questions that are often asked.

Luckily, online employment website Glassdoor has examined tens of thousands of actual interview questions reported by actual people, and they collected the 50 most common interview questions for you to rehearse.

From classic questions like "Where do you see yourself in five years?" to curveballs like "How would you fire someone?" these are the interview questions that you're most likely to hear.

1. What are your strengths?

2. What are your weaknesses?

3. Why are you interested in working for [company name]?

While it's generally true that hackers and identity thieves work hard to be one step ahead of everyone else, they usually get the goods because of a victim's dumb action.

There are some well-known tricks to stay safe online, but there are also easy ones that many people may not know about. In times when hotel Wi-Fi networks are being hacked and hackers can be easily hired, it's important to be as cautious as possible.

Here are a few ways to even better protect yourself from unwanted hacking.

Use a VPN

Virtualized private networks (VPNs) serve many functions. Put simply, a VPN is a group of computers digitally connected together making a secure private sub-network within another larger one (usually the internet). They are often used in businesses and universities to create secure networks. They are also frequently used by people in censored countries because VPNs mask countries' IP addresses. 

This tool is very useful to protect against hacking because they make all web traffic end-to-end encrypted. This means that any data you enter while using a VPN is protected from external intrusion. VPNs are also great for surfing the web on public Wi-Fi networks, because they ensure end-to-end encryption for all traffic. This means that all the data transferred is protected. Hotspot Shield is one of the more popular VPNs on the market.

Avoid the cloud

This may sound counterintuitive as the cloud is one of the biggest digital products around. But there's a good argument to be made that anything can be hacked.

The Snowden leaks have shown that even the most secure networks have probably been infiltrated. So if you have private data you don't want exposed, it's probably best to back it up locally instead of on a big company's cloud.

Don't link your accounts

While linking accounts is a great way to streamline all of your digital information, it also gives hackers a way to connect the dots.

For example, if someone gets your Twitter password and you have your company's Twitter account also linked, then your company may also get hacked in some capacity.

So while linking may make your life easier, it also makes a hacker's life easier.

If you think the promised land for starting your career is New York City or San Francisco, think again.

Your best prospects for building your new life are actually in Irving, Texas, according to personal finance site WalletHub. 

To determine the best places for recent college graduates to launch their burgeoning careers, WalletHub analyzed and ranked the 150 most populous US cities based on 19 metrics pertaining to professional opportunities and quality of life.

Metrics included the number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents, housing affordability, annual job growth rate, recreation ranking, unemployment rate, and number of leisure establishments in the area.

To read more about the study's methodology, check out the full report here.

No. 10: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Monthly median starting salary: $2,754

Number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 16

Coming in at No. 10 overall is Tulsa, Oklahoma. It earned a professional opportunities rank of No. 5 and ranked No. 61 for quality of life. WalletHub also ranks the city as the second best for entrepreneurial activity.

No. 9: Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Monthly median starting salary: $2,190

Number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 9

WalletHub ranks Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the second best city for families and the sixth best for entrepreneurial activity, which makes the city the fourth best in terms of overall quality of life and No. 18 for overall professional opportunities.

No. 8: Fort Worth, Texas

Monthly median starting salary: $3,013

Number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 29

Affordable housing options is one of the many reasons Fort Worth, Texas, is one of the best cities for overall professional opportunities and No. 41 for quality of life.

Drinking craft beer has become more than just a hobby — it's a conquest, especially when it comes to limited edition beers that can be as scarce (and as alcoholic) as some wines.

Some of these beers have huge, cult-like followings, with release parties and wait lines that queue up 24 hours in advance. And vintage bottles of the ones that age well can sell at auction for thousands of dollars.

In honor of American Craft Beer Week (May 11-17), we've rounded up the 17 most coveted craft beers in America, based on availability, release schedule, and desirability.

17. Bourbon County Series (Goose Island Brewery)

Goose Island's "Bourbon County" series includes the Bourbon County Stout, Coffee Stout, Barleywine, and Proprietor's Stout. Goose Island releases new batches each year, but with variations in recipes. 2014's Vanilla Rye, a new addition to the series, is a boozy, 13.8% alcohol by volume (ABV) stout aged in rye whiskey barrels from four different distilleries.

The Chicago-based brewery distributes to most states, but the seasonal release of the Bourbon County series means bottles can be harder to find, not to mention that the Proprietor's Stout is only available in Chicago, and the Vanilla Rye is a limited edition only sold in 22-ounce bottles.

16. Nugget Nectar (Troëgs Brewing Co.)

Nugget Nectar is a seasonal, hoppy amber ale from Pennsylvania-based Troëgs Brewing Company. It's citrusy with a malt backbone, boozy at nearly 8% ABV, and, as Deadspin's Will Gordon notes, would probably be called an "imperial red IPA" if it hadn't already been released before the huge IPA craze.

It's fairly easy to find if you're in one of the 11 states Troëgs distributes to (and when it's in season), but if you're not, you may be traveling to get ahold of Pennsylvania's best beer.

15. Utopias (Samuel Adams)

Utopias is an insane barleywine that Samuel Adams has been experimenting with since 2002. It claims to be one of the first barrel-aged beers and ranges in absurd alcohol contents from year to year, from 24% to 30%. It comes in a unique, kettle-style container reminiscent of a genie lamp, and with only about 15,000 bottles released each season (and usually only on odd-numbered years), they often sell for around $200 a bottle.

Thirteen different states actually prohibit the sale of such a high-alcohol beer. 

The mansion prominently featured in the 1983 film classic "Scarface" is not actually in Miami. Instead, it's in Montecito, California, which lies about 90 miles west of Los Angeles.

However, the mansion is still just as beautiful as you remember from the movie. It's also been renovated recently — so it's possibly even more beautiful.

The mansion is still on the market after sitting unsold for an asking price of $35 million. Its price has now been cut in half to $17.8 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The 10,000-square-foot mansion's four bedrooms and nine bathrooms are completely surrounded by Persian gardens and an insane number of fountains.

Emily Kellenberger of Village Properties has the listing.

Surprise! Tony Montana's Miami mansion isn't actually in Miami.

Instead, it's a sprawling, 10-acre edifice in Montecito, California (about 90 miles west of Los Angeles).

The mansion, named El Fureidis, was originally built in 1906.

We all do things we aren't proud of with our money.

Whether that's selling stock in a company right before its value skyrockets, shrinking away from negotiating our salary, or simply dragging our heels on opening a retirement savings account, even the best of us are prone to mistakes.

Successful people are no exception.

We spoke with seven CEOs, executives, and multimillionaires to find out exactly which of their financial choices over the years made them cringe.

Read on to find out how these highly successful people answered the question, "What's your biggest financial regret?"

Jacquelyn Smith, Jenna Goudreau, and Richard Feloni contributed reporting to this story.

Letting other people talk you out of great investments.

Tony Robbins, multimillionaire life coach:

"I have a resort in Fiji, and there was a little company that bottled water. The bottle looked cool, and the water tasted really incredible — you could tell the difference. I hired a guy to give me research [on the business]. He was a so-called 'expert.' And I said, 'I think I can make an investment in this. I think I can get 30% of the company for half a million dollars.'

"He came back to me and said they don't have the resources or capacity to make it. And I accepted that. I look back on Fiji Water and anytime I grab one I say, 'Holy shit!' So use your experts as coaches and do your own homework and dig deep."

Buying stock in a bank that 'couldn't' go under.

Ken Lin, CEO and founder of Credit Karma, which recently reached a $1 billion valuation:

"In 2008, I bought shares of WaMu two days before they collapsed. At that time, I thought that it was panicked selling and that a bank like WaMu wouldn’t or couldn’t go under.

"Clearly, I was wrong. It did teach me a valuable lesson about how fast things can change in business."

Overthinking investing.

Jon Stein, founder and CEO of Betterment:

"I wasted so much time and money by overthinking investing. Whether it was opening a dozen brokerage accounts, getting too concentrated in individual securities (thanks Enron), and attempting to do overly complicated transactions — it was a waste.

"I should have just taken the index route in my younger years. I'd be in a better place for retirement now, and I would have been able to spend more time with friends and family.

"The money is one thing, but I'll especially never get back the hundreds of hours I poured into trying to beat the market."

If the recent upheaval in Baltimore, Ferguson, and other cities around the US shows us anything about the state of law enforcement in this country, it's that the relationship between police and civilians is a a delicate one.

Few know this better than the police force in Newark, New Jersey. The city's crime rates are consistently double the national average, and it has seen its fair share of accusations of abuse and corruption within police ranks. 

It's also a city that photographer Matt Gunther holds dear to his heart. Gunther, a self-described "insulated Manhattan kid" growing up, discovered his interest in Newark by accident. "I was driving an ex-girlfriend to the airport and I got lost and we ended up in Newark. It was love at first sight; it was my kind of city," he says. He knew he had to document it.

Gunther was embedded with the Newark Police force on and off for nearly a decade between 2002 and 2011, capturing everything he saw. The photos use a fair and democratic hand, with both civilians and police treated with sympathy and respect, and show a more nuanced side of the divide than we see everyday on the news.

His work was recently compiled into a book, titled "Probable Cause," which is out now on Schilt. We spoke with Matt about his new book and his experience with the Newark Police.

Once Gunther fell in love with Newark, he knew he wanted to photograph it. But he wasn't sure how he should tackle the project.

He would take the PATH train from Manhattan to Newark, sit in the middle of town and think about ways to capture the city. Then, he got it. "After two or three months, I realized what was a constant in Newark was police life," he says.

Through a string of family connections, Gunther was put in touch with the Newark Police. He sent a proposal to embed with the police force and was denied. But, he persisted. "After four months of sending proposals, I finally was accepted," he says.

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Cristiano Ronaldo is No. 4 on our list of the most dominant athletes in the world.

He's also the world's highest-paid soccer player, which means he has a decent amount of cash to burn.

The 30-year-old forward for Real Madrid owns luxury cars, flies around the world in private jets, and makes a mint on endorsement deals — and that's not even half of it.

He earned $80 million last year, making him the second highest-paid athlete in the world.

Source: Forbes

And more than a quarter of that ($28 million) is in endorsement deals with companies like Tag Heuer and Nike.

Source: Forbes

He rakes in over $9 million from his Nike deal alone.

Source: Sport

Android and iOS are different in many ways, but switching between the two doesn't have to be painful.

If you're planning to ditch your current Android phone, the good news is you'll be able to transfer your contacts, photos, and almost everything else to your new iPhone.

Here's a quick overview of what you can transfer, what you can't, and how to get started. 

Switching over your email accounts

The iPhone supports the same mail clients as Android, so you should be able to seamlessly transfer all of your email accounts. You can download Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Aol Mail all from the App Store. Or, you can login to any of these email accounts through Apple’s default Mail app.

Moving your photos and videos using the cloud

Services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive let you store photos and videos in the cloud so that you can view them on any device. All three of these apps work across iOS and Android too, so all you need to do is back everything up to the cloud service of your choice on your Android phone, download the app on your new iPhone, then download to the new phone.

Transferring your photos and videos manually through iTunes

If you don’t want to do this through a cloud service, you can also load all of your photos onto your new iPhone through iTunes on your computer.

First you’ll need to plug your old Android phone into your computer using the USB charging cord it came with. If you’re using a PC, you should be able to click on your Android phone once you plug it in, the same way you would find an external hard drive. If you’re using a Mac, however, you’ll need to download the Android File Transfer app, which lets you browse and drag-and-drop files from your Android phone to your Mac.

We live in a complex, ever-changing world, with several opportunities and dangers ahead of us.

We've taken a closer look at 20 of the most important economic, political, environmental, and social themes that define the state of our world and its future.

China's rise and its challenges, the emergence of robotics as a major economic force, Greece's fiscal woes, and the threat posed by a warming climate are among the most important things happening in the world today.

Source

Source

Image: Reuters

Source (Pakistan agreement)

Source (Russia agreement)

Job prospects are looking better this year for recent college grads, but that doesn't mean all US cities are experiencing the same hiring boom.

Employment opportunities vary significantly based on geography, and some cities still lag behind when it comes to things like job growth and unemployment rates.

To determine the worst places for recent college graduates to launch their burgeoning careers, personal finance site WalletHub analyzed and ranked the 150-most-populous US cities based on 19 metrics pertaining to professional opportunities and quality of life.

Metrics included the number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents, housing affordability, annual job growth rate, recreation ranking, unemployment rate, and number of leisure establishments in the area. (Read the full report and methodology here.)

No. 10: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Monthly median starting salary: $2,186

Number of entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 26

With stalling population growth and poor economic mobility, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, landed the No. 147 spot for overall professional opportunities and No. 122 for quality of life.

No. 9: Mobile, Alabama

Monthly median starting salary: $2,388

Entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 12

Mobile, Alabama, has few single people to hang out with and even fewer entry-level jobs, earning the city an overall professional-opportunities rank of No. 133 and overall quality-of-life score of 149 out of 150.

No. 8: Modesto, California

Monthly median starting salary: $1,908

Entry-level jobs per 10,000 residents: 13

With a high unemployment rate and very few things to do in your downtime, Modesto, California, might not be the best place to start out. The city comes in at No. 138 for overall professional opportunities and No. 141 for overall quality of life. Modesto does rank seventh for its great weather, though.

Happy 31 birthday, Mark Zuckerberg!

Regardless of what you think of Facebook, it's one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.  

And regardless of what you think of Zuckerberg, he's the one who built the company into the behemoth that it is today. 

These quotes exemplify how Facebook became so massive and why Zuck was the guy to make it happen.

On his early passion: "I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system."

Source. 

On Facebook's real founding history: "I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded."

Source. 

But there was a dark side to the founding story, too...

On people giving him their personal information when Facebook had just got started at Harvard (via instant message): "I don't know why ... they 'trust me' ... dumb f*cks."

Zuckerberg was 19 at the time. 

Much later, in 2010, he said the following to explain:

"When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use."

Source. 

With a spate of new restaurant and media projects, ousted Food Network chef Paula Deen is reinventing herself.

First order of business: unload the custom-designed Savannah home where she filmed her cancelled cooking show. 

Featuring a gourmet kitchen, more refrigerators than you can count on one hand, a chicken coop, and a dish pantry, it's the house that butter built. 

The 6-year-old, French-Caribbean style mansion was built to be Deen's dream home. Christie's International Real Estate has the $12.5 million listing.

Her youngest son, Bobby, was married in the living room.

Deen is a great collector of antique dishware, so naturally there is a dish room with plenty of cabinetry.

Not too long ago, it was commonplace for people across the globe to die horrific, painful, disfiguring deaths from illnesses they couldn't control.

Today, many of those diseases have begun to disappear.

In many parts of the developed world, some of the worst of these diseases are gone completely. Their disappearance is a testament to the power of vaccines.

Yet these diseases still exist in many other countries, and public health workers are working hard to contain their spread and increase peoples' access to the shots and pills we often take for granted.

Smallpox

Smallpox is a serious, contagious, and sometimes fatal disease.

Its first symptoms are fairly mild, and include fever, fatigue, and body aches. Within days, these less severe signs give way to more serious problems which leave an infected person contagious for about a month.

First, small red spots on the tongue and mouth transform into painful sores that break open and spread the virus into the mouth and throat. Then, a rash blossoms on the skin, starting on the face and spreading all over the body — usually in less than a day. In a few days, the rash transforms into a series of raised bumps, which quickly fill with a thick, creamy liquid. The bumps typically have tiny depressions in the center that look like a bellybutton. The bumps soon become tiny, hard knobs — some people liken them to having BB gun pellets under the skin. Those form a crust over the skin, then scab and eventually fall off.

Thankfully, the last case of smallpox in the US was nearly six decades ago, in 1949, after a successful vaccination campaign.

The last global case of the disease occurred in 1977, after access to the vaccine had spread enough to wipe the disease from the globe.

Measles

Like smallpox, measles is highly contagious. Its most serious complications include blindness, severe diarrhea, serious respiratory infections, and encephalitis, a severe infection that causes brain swelling.

New research also finds that measles can have a crippling, sometimes long term effect on children's immune systems for years after an initial infection, leaving them susceptible to other infectious diseases. The vaccine, the research suggests, protects against this.

The good news is that aside from a scary outbreak in California last December — which research suggests was caused by a growing number of parents refusing vaccinations for their children — measles has been largely eliminated in most affluent countries, and deaths from measles across the globe have dropped by 75% since 2000. 

Still, the virus is still common in many developing countries, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia, but the WHO has plans to eliminate the disease globally by 2020.

Polio

Polio is a crippling and sometimes deadly infectious disease. There is no cure.

Most cases of the disease — somewhere between 90% and 95% — cause no symptoms, making it easy for an infected person to get another person sick. In those cases, people can recover within a few weeks.

In about 1% of cases, however, or around 1 in 200 cases, polio can leave its sufferers with permanent physical disabilities. In these cases, the virus spreads along the pathways inside the nerve fibers in the spinal cord, brain stem, or motor cortex, the movement-controlling part of the brain. Once inside, polio eats away at the nerves inside these parts of the body that allow us to move. Among people with polio who become paralyzed, about 5% to 10% die when the muscles that control their breathing are rendered immobile by the virus.

In the last 3 decades, cases of polio across the globe have plummeted, dropping nearly 99% since 1988. That year, the World Health Assembly resolved to globally eradicate polio, and several international health organizations joined in the effort to disseminate the vaccine worldwide. 

As of last year, just 3 countries still see regular cases of polio: Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and efforts are underway to eradicate the disease completely.