What a topical question! people get SO passionate and opinionated about vaccination so its a really HOT area to talk about.
Lots of horrible diseases have been stopped in the world because of vaccination. Diseases like smallpox and polio for example. These days we can vaccinate against measles and mumps, hepatitis, polio, etc etc etc. lots and lots and these vaccinations are part of the normal routine for most babies.
But people are also aware that the immune system is a complex thing and very rarely, it can react to the vaccination in strange ways. This is what people are scared of and so decide not to get their baby vaccinated. This decision puts their baby at risk of getting the nasty diseases, but also puts other children at risk. The bad reactions to vaccinations are SO rare, often even more rare than the risk of getting the disease if you weren’t vaccinated.
So the benefits of vaccination almost always outweigh the risks, and that’s why most doctors encourage vaccinating babies against these horrible diseases.
In Australia, newborn babies only get vaccinated/immunised against one disease (Hepatitis B): it isn’t until the age of two months that they get a few more.
Before vaccines were invented, many many more babies, children, and adults died of all sorts of nasty diseases. As Kate says, it is thanks to vaccines — and government programs to vaccinate everybody — that smallpox has been completely wiped out (so nobody is vaccinated against smallpox any more) and polio is almost gone.
Hi jaxterjohns,
What a topical question! people get SO passionate and opinionated about vaccination so its a really HOT area to talk about.
Lots of horrible diseases have been stopped in the world because of vaccination. Diseases like smallpox and polio for example. These days we can vaccinate against measles and mumps, hepatitis, polio, etc etc etc. lots and lots and these vaccinations are part of the normal routine for most babies.
But people are also aware that the immune system is a complex thing and very rarely, it can react to the vaccination in strange ways. This is what people are scared of and so decide not to get their baby vaccinated. This decision puts their baby at risk of getting the nasty diseases, but also puts other children at risk. The bad reactions to vaccinations are SO rare, often even more rare than the risk of getting the disease if you weren’t vaccinated.
So the benefits of vaccination almost always outweigh the risks, and that’s why most doctors encourage vaccinating babies against these horrible diseases.
1
Hi jaxterjohns,
In Australia, newborn babies only get vaccinated/immunised against one disease (Hepatitis B): it isn’t until the age of two months that they get a few more.
Before vaccines were invented, many many more babies, children, and adults died of all sorts of nasty diseases. As Kate says, it is thanks to vaccines — and government programs to vaccinate everybody — that smallpox has been completely wiped out (so nobody is vaccinated against smallpox any more) and polio is almost gone.
1