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The history of vaccines essay
The history of vaccines essay
Importance of vaccinations for children
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Many diseases that were once quite common are now preventable thanks to development of vaccines. A 2003 study by researchers at the Pediatric Academic Society showed that childhood vaccines prevent 10.5 million cases of infectious diseases, reports Procon.org. Early vaccination can protect your child when they are the most vulnerable to dangerous diseases, according to Harvard Medical School. In addition, vaccinations can benefit the entire community because they can cause your child’s immune system to speed up and stop your child from becoming contagious to others or even shorten the length of time your child is contagious. Pro: The ingredients in vaccines are safe in the amounts used. Ingredients, such as thimerosal, formaldehyde, and aluminum, can be harmful in large doses but they are not used in harmful quantities in vaccines. Children are …show more content…
If combination vaccines were not available, the number of injections would more than double for each visit. As an immunologist, vaccine advocate and wife of a pediatrician, I adhere to and understand the structure of the recommended immunization schedule. However, as a mother I must admit that even I would be hesitant to submit my children to 10+ separate shots per. Vaccines work to prime your immune system against future “attacks” by a particular disease. There are vaccines against both viral and bacterial pathogens, or disease-causing agents. When a pathogen enters your body, your immune system generates antibodies to try to fight it off. Depending on the strength of your immune response and how effectively the antibodies fight off the pathogen, you may or may not get sick. If you do fall ill, however, some of the antibodies that are created will remain in your body playing watchdog after you’re no longer sick. If you’re exposed to the same pathogen in the future, the antibodies will ”recognize” it and fight it
Illnesses are not something that a child wants to have, nor is it something that a parent wants to deal with. Vaccinating your child will prevent him/her from either developing an illness or obtaining the illness
Edward Jenner invented a method to protect against smallpox in the late 1700s. The method involved taking substances from an open wound of someone with small-pox or cow-pox and injecting it into another person’s skin, also called “arm-to-arm inoculation”. The earliest actual documented examples of vaccination date all the way back to the tenth century in China (Lombard, “A brief history of vaccines and vaccinations”). The mention of early vaccination was taken note of by a French scholar, Henri Husson, written in one of his journals (Dictionaire des sciences médicale). The Ottoman Empire Turks also discovered a method of immunization a few centuries later. Lady Montagu of Great Britain, a famous writer and wife of the English ambassador of Istanbul, between 1716 -1718, came across the Turkish vaccine for small-pox. After surviving as a child with small-pox, she insisted her son be vaccinated (Henricy, “Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Wortley Montagu”). When she returned to England, she continued to publicize the Turkish tradition of immunization and spread their methods to the rest of her country. She also had all family members also vaccinated. Immunization was soon adopted in England, nearly 50 years before Jenner's smallpox vaccine in 1796 (Sharp, “Anti-vaccinationists past and present”). Edward Jenner’s target for smallpox was to eradicate it. And later by the 1940s, knowledge of the science behind vaccines had developed and soon reached the point where across-the-board vaccine production was a goal that was possible and where serious disease control efforts could start. Vaccines for many dangerous diseases, including ones protecting against pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus were underway into production. ...
According to the CDC, all vaccines carry a risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) in about one per million children. Most vaccine-preventable diseases can cause serious or life-threatening infections in infants and young children. For example, exposure and infection with polio can occur at a very young age and can cause paralysis, so the vaccine should be given to infants as soon as possible. People should be aware of what vaccines are capable of doing other than saving lives, because of the life threatening effects, the harmful ingredients, and vaccines are unnatural. Vaccines are not just a poke into a person’s body.
This generation is debating if flu vaccinations are good or bad. There is a ton of mixed emotions for this topic. Starting with how vaccines can affect you positively, and negatively, and lastly, the important ones you should take.
By being vaccinated, the person is not only helping themselves but others around them too. Vaccines are an important tool for preventing disease and should be mandatory for all people. Childhood vaccines protect children from a variety of serious or possibly fatal diseases, including diphtheria, measles, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and whooping cough (Clinic Staff). By vaccinating children against diseases, it helps children grow into strong, healthy adults. Today, children in the United States continuously get vaccines that protect them from more than a dozen diseases (Childhood Immunization).
Just like prescription drugs, vaccines can be a harmful risk. For example, the small pox vaccine that is recommended by government health officials carries a risk for complications like inflammation of the brain which can lead to damage of the brain or even death. People who believe we should have mandatory vaccinations will say that vaccines have saved many lives, and though its true vaccines have also caused many serious and sometimes fatal side effects. There are also many cases where many parents strongly believe that some vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The reason being that many parents noticed shortly after their child was vaccinated they noticed symptoms like loss of language abilities and they were suddenly stopped interacting with people. Also, the vaccines used to treat measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) are linked to many autism cases. Vaccines that contain thimerosal, which is an organic compound that contains mercury, has also been suspected to cause autism in children. Thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines because of its linkage to autism. Scientist believe that MMR vaccines trigger a regressive form of autism, because the measles virus in the vaccine embeds itself in the intestine, causing some kind of reaction in the brain. Mercury, a chemical element, is used in a lot of vaccines can be very dangerous. High levels of
In recent years, the correlation between vaccines and autism has become the subject of much debate. On one side, there are the anti-vaccinators, or anti-vaccers. On the other, there’s pretty much everyone else. Despite the fact that the anti-vaccination movement has little base in scientific fact, their campaign to end early infanthood vaccinations rages on. While doctors and scientists try desperately to make parents look at the research studies, vaccination rates continue to fall. But, even in these dark times, there is still hope that scientific fact will prevail and defeat the anti-vaccination fear mongers who have caused many children to fall ill and even die because their parents did not properly vaccinate them. This is one of the most saddening scientific failures of the twenty-first century. A failure to educate the public properly has resulted in child, even infant, fatalities. The anti-vaccination movement was started based on falsified data and continues only because of a lack of knowledge and proper education of the general public.
Another point my opposition makes is mandatory vaccinations threaten religious freedom, which is our (US citizens) 1st amendment right. Effectively forcing citizens to get vaccinated in itself sounds harsh, but some citizens have ethical and moral dis agreeance with optional vaccines; the debate stems from the fact that some vaccines were derived from aborted fetuses. Here is a quote from a prominent professor: ¨During the Rubella epidemic of 1964, some doctors advised pregnant women who were exposed to the disease to abort their children. The resulting virus strain became known in the science world as RA/27/3. R stands for Rubella, A stands for Abortus, 27 stands for the 27th fetus tested, and 3 stands for the 3rd tissue explant. In other
Those who actively pursue denying the rights of others while trying to further their cause lead to a hatred against their movement. Vaccines, while an important aspect in maintaining proper health they should not be absolutely mandatory. The choice of vaccination should be left to the parents, as it is their right to nurture and care for their kids as they see fit(Anthony). Furthermore, a governmental mandate on vaccination causes many issues, it denies rights to the parents, it denies right to the grown adults and it taxes those who don’t comply. This strategy is not a very American approach, it is a strict mandate, and order then to conform. This goes against the American concepts of individualism(Anthony), this concept is Communist. There are also many circumstances that mandatory vaccination neglects, this includes the civil liberties granted to all citizens by the first amendment, and the equal protection granted by the 13 amendment(US Constitution). There are many reasons why the idea of mandatory
How would you feel if your child was to catch a deadly disease at school from another student that had not been vaccinated. For many years, vaccinations have been forced unto babies and smaller children to help prevent a future epidemic such as the ones from many centuries ago. Later within the years after vaccinations seem to have been proven effective and slightly popular, they became mandatory for a student to be vaccinated before being able to enroll into a school. Most parents went along with the new rule ,but there were still many parents that strongly disagreed and felt that it violated their liberty to make decisions for their child 's lives. I personally believe that vaccinations should be forced among students for reason such as: combat deadly diseases, suppress
Vaccinations are an important part of our world and communities because they halt the spread of preventable diseases, such as the measles, mumps, and the whooping cough. Vaccinations also help eventually get rid of these diseases for good. Matthew F. Daley, a pediatrician and researcher, writes in Scientific American, “... the failure to vaccinate children endangers both the health of
The Anti-Vax Issue According to World Book Advanced Encyclopedia, immunization is defined as the process of protecting the body against disease by means of vaccines or serums (Hinman). While medical science backs up the efficiency and necessity of vaccines, within the past decade, a rise in parents disbelieving the medical community and neglecting to immunize their children has occurred. This “fear of vaccines” is nothing new, but with the ever-increasing safety of vaccines, the benefits of inoculation far outweigh the risks. Parents who refuse to vaccinate, or anti-vaxxers, put more than their children’s lives on the line, but also risk the safety of the whole community. Because vaccines are essential to protecting individuals and communities
Recently the number of parents who are intentionally delaying their children’s general vaccinations is increasing. The controversy that is causing the number of delayed vaccinations to go up is based on the fact that there are negative articles connecting them to autism and other similar diseases. When parents are researching vaccinations and they read those negative articles, those articles make them believe that vaccines cause autism. Vaccines are important because they protect humans from preventable diseases and getting them could save human lives. Vaccines are important throughout life no matter what some research suggests. Parents are now more likely to intentionally delay vaccines because of negative press, even though vaccines
A prevailing argument that pro-voluntaristic individuals frequently make is that vaccines have the potential to be harmful to individuals; a primary motive behind this pertains to an alleged correlation that exists between thimerosal, a component of vaccines, and countless disorders including autism (Benjamin, 2003). According to Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, “When you take a look at the ever-increasing numbers of doses of vaccines babies have gotten over the past two decades and you see this corresponding rise in chronic disease and disability in our children, it is out of control” (Benjamin, 2003). Many speculated that the mercury contained within the thimerosal was to blame for this. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), thimerosal contains a form of mercury known as ethylmercury that quickly evacuates the body and cannot cause adverse reactions unless exposure involves abnormally large doses (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015). Nevertheless, a fair handful of United States citizens are medically unable to receive vaccines; for example, out of a billion people, nearly 250,000 possible vaccine reactions were documented
Rotavirus is an infectious virus that causes severe diarrhea, abdominal pain, dehydration, vomiting, and fever. Rotavirus is one of the main causes of death in babies and almost all U.S. babies have had at least one bout with Rotavirus in their lives. There are more than 100 million people that are affected by Rotavirus worldwide and about 500,000 people who are affected in the U.S. Each year rotavirus kills a couple 100 thousand kids and in 2013 WHO estimated about 215,000 children younger than 5 years old died that year. Asia and Africa are places where rotavirus is most common because these are where there are many developing countries and because of that they have a harder time preventing rotavirus. In developing countries, they don’t have the development to be able to have certain medications or vaccines because vaccines can be very expensive to people with low income.