Vaccinate Your Kids Episode 3: Revenge of the Preventable Diseases
November 22nd 2010 03:37
Well, here it is, the third post in my series about how important vaccinations are. It won't be as long as I had originally planned, but the article I link to explains things better than I ever could.
This is what happens when people do not get necessary vaccinations. In case you don't feel like following that link, it leads to a story about a kid that caught meningitis from an unvaccinated person (the kid wasn't old enough to have the vaccination) and lost both feet and some fingers to the disease. This disease is preventable with vaccination...if the person he caught it from had been vaccinated, that person wouldn't have been able to pass the disease on to the kid.
Want to hear something terrifying, and also heartbreaking? Australia is having a whooping cough epidemic due to under-vaccination. Several babies died last year and there were over 19,000 reported cases. Whooping cough is preventable. But once again, kids that were too young to be vaccinated caught it from people that had not been vaccinated.
Most articles about vaccination (and the vaccine song I posted about, which I suggest you watch if you haven't) talk about something called "Herd Immunity." Look it up if you want particulars, but basically, if pretty much everyone is vaccinated (and thus immune) to a disease, they can't catch it and pass it on to someone that's not vaccinated. If every adult in a group is vaccinated against whooping cough, they won't pass it on to the kids in that group even if the adults interact with people infected with whooping cough. I may not be putting that into the most understandable terms, but boils down to the fact that if the majority of people are vaccinated against a disease, that disease can't gain a foothold.
Unfortunately, as vaccination rates drop due to anti-vaccination campaigns, herd immunity is dropping, leading to a lot of preventable diseases making comebacks. Measles outbreaks have been happening all over the U.S. in places where vaccination rates are down. I never thought of measles as something to worry about, because I've been vaccinated. But now I worry for my son and my soon-to-be-born child, and will absolutely have them vaccinated as soon as possible and on schedule. Not just for their sakes either-vaccination helps everybody.
This is what happens when people do not get necessary vaccinations. In case you don't feel like following that link, it leads to a story about a kid that caught meningitis from an unvaccinated person (the kid wasn't old enough to have the vaccination) and lost both feet and some fingers to the disease. This disease is preventable with vaccination...if the person he caught it from had been vaccinated, that person wouldn't have been able to pass the disease on to the kid.
Want to hear something terrifying, and also heartbreaking? Australia is having a whooping cough epidemic due to under-vaccination. Several babies died last year and there were over 19,000 reported cases. Whooping cough is preventable. But once again, kids that were too young to be vaccinated caught it from people that had not been vaccinated.
Most articles about vaccination (and the vaccine song I posted about, which I suggest you watch if you haven't) talk about something called "Herd Immunity." Look it up if you want particulars, but basically, if pretty much everyone is vaccinated (and thus immune) to a disease, they can't catch it and pass it on to someone that's not vaccinated. If every adult in a group is vaccinated against whooping cough, they won't pass it on to the kids in that group even if the adults interact with people infected with whooping cough. I may not be putting that into the most understandable terms, but boils down to the fact that if the majority of people are vaccinated against a disease, that disease can't gain a foothold.
Unfortunately, as vaccination rates drop due to anti-vaccination campaigns, herd immunity is dropping, leading to a lot of preventable diseases making comebacks. Measles outbreaks have been happening all over the U.S. in places where vaccination rates are down. I never thought of measles as something to worry about, because I've been vaccinated. But now I worry for my son and my soon-to-be-born child, and will absolutely have them vaccinated as soon as possible and on schedule. Not just for their sakes either-vaccination helps everybody.
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