According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, more than three million people die from vaccine-preventable diseases each year.
The World Health Organization reports that an improvement in the global vaccination coverage, which has remained at 85 percent for the past few years, would help avoid an additional 1.5 million deaths.
Years of research can testify vaccines are effective and safe, the circulation of misunderstandings has led more and more parents to refrain from vaccinating their kids.
Common concerns are vaccines may give kids autism, overload their immune systems or that kids will benefit more from natural immunity to contagious diseases. These same people also believe immunization is not necessary because infection rates in the United States are already low.
Doctors recommend children receive vaccines at a young age after immunity from their mother subsides. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a healthy baby’s immune system accommodates multiple vaccines, and can respond to approximately 100,000 organisms at once.
Therefore, parents should not worry about overloading their child’s immune system, as they run a greater risk by delaying vaccination. The longer they wait to vaccinate their children, the longer the child risks exposure to a serious and potentially life-threatening disease.
Some parents mistakenly link autism to vaccines, since doctors often diagnose the mental condition at the age children receive most of their vaccinations. But according to a 2001 article by The Journal of American Medical Association, autism appears to be rising even among unvaccinated children.
A vaccine is just a tool that helps enhance the body’s natural immunity to infectious diseases.
The decline in immunization rate is responsible for the recent reappearances of vaccine-preventable diseases, like the whooping cough or measles.
The Public Health Organization recorded 9,120 cases of whooping cough in California in 2010, more than any year since the introduction of the vaccine in the 1940s. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported a total of 125 measles cases occurred from December of 2014 to February of 2015.
Vaccines save approximately 2.5 million lives each year, and the introduction of a vaccine in 1980 eradicated smallpox world-wide.
It is unreasonable to reject the progress scientists have made in terms of saving people from fatal infections. Whatever concerns parents have regarding vaccination do not carry any weight to the risk of their child dying.
Children who are too young to receive certain vaccines can die prematurely if they come into contact with transmittable diseases.
Vaccination is neither a political issue, nor one that should be in any way controversial.
Vaccine-preventable infections are dangerous, and at times, life-threatening.
As individuals, we all have a responsibility to the communities we live in to protect both ourselves and each other by preventing the spread of such diseases through vaccination.