The Case For Vaccinations

Image by Sanofi Pasteur via Flickr
Why the unpopularity of vaccinations is causing a disease comeback.

Over the past decade, the practice of vaccinating children has become very controversial. Many parents are opting out of having their kids vaccinated and many schools are allowing children to not have all of their shots based on personal exemptions. The rise in this practice is causing concern for many in the health care industry and is  facilitating a rise in many infectious diseases that haven't been seen in several decades.


Think about it, when was the last time you worried about your kids getting measles? After all, no one really gets that disease anymore, right? Maybe not. Back in it's heyday, before children were routinely immunized, measles infected 3 to 4 million Americans each year causing 400 to 500 deaths. Just a dozen years ago, in 2000, the Centers for Disease control and Prevention announced that the disease had been eradicated in the United States, except for imported cases.


This year, a 7 year old boy who had vacationed in Switzerland with his parents caught the measles, brought them home and infected his siblings, five schoolmates and four children at his doctor's office. Even diseases like Whooping cough and Polio have seen a rise in new cases.


The spread of measles could have been prevented by routine immunizations. Even if the child's parent didn't have their child immunized, it still wasn't a huge issue because most of the other children wouldn't be able to catch it. Today, with the rise in unvaccinated children, the disease has a chance to establish a foothold.


Although there are some people who attribute early childhood immunizations with the rise in Autism, claiming that vaccinations have a large amount of mercury. However, since 2001, no vaccinations contain mercury at all. Still, there are more and more Autism cases each year which proves that the immunization theory isn't valid.


Still, these fears have made many parents leery of having their children vaccinated. It's easy to think that these shots aren't important because they protect our children from diseases that aren't even around anymore. The truth is, the reason they aren't around is because of vaccinations. Without them, we would be back in a place where children would be exposed to a very real risk of measles, mumps, polio and so on. More children would be sick, hospitalized and even dying from these diseases that we can prevent.


Generations ago, making the case for vaccination was easy. Diseases were sweeping through classrooms and everyone knew someone who had either suffered through a disease or who had lost a child to one. Convincing parents that getting a shot for polio was worth the risk was easy. The rare child who wasn't immunized, who was too young to get shots or who was too ill to be immunized was still protected because everyone one else was vaccinated and wouldn't be carrying the disease.


We live in a high tech world and we take many advances for granted. Electricity, water treatment plants, workplace safety, building codes and healthy children and adequate food supply. It's easy to forget how quickly these things can change if we don't keep working at them. We all need to remember that without these things, we as human would be stuck living dirty, sick and short lives.


I don't know what can be done to turn the tide on the idea that immunizations are bad for children. What do you think can be done to prevent these diseases from making a comeback? Please share your thoughts in the comments.




By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for HealthcareJobsiteBlog and Beyond.com.. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.

Related articles

• The Rise Of Homeless Children (manufacturingworkersblog.com)
• Will We All Live to be 100? (healthcarejobsiteblog.com)
• What Our Parents Knew About Stretching a Budget (phillyjobsblog.com)

Will We All Live to be 100?

An author predicts that we will all live to be 100.

I know, it sounds like a weird futuristic prediction, but author Sonia Arrison says that with help from the healthcare industry, we can all live to be 100 years old or more. To some, it might sound too good to be true, although I think that it could be exhausting.

In her new book, 100 Plus, she says that technology and healthcare will be working together to help people live longer lives. She theorizes that since scientists have mapped the human genome, they can reverse engineer it to allow medical professionals to repair damage and replace diseased or ageing organs.

It's an incredible idea, but I can't help but wonder what the impact of that type of longevity will be. Will we be forced to cope with an even larger population boom? Right now, as new people are born, older people die. It's the circle of life and increased life-spans will certainly delay the process. Already, our planet is struggling with overpopulation and some countries have even placed strict limits on reproduction. Will that become commonplace?

Another issue, at least to my mind, is healthcare costs. If it becomes possible for medical professionals to just grow a new heart using stem cells and replace a diseased one, what will the cost be? Will the life saving and life span extending procedures become something that only the rich will be able to afford? Will there be a black market for organs? Even worse, will there be greedy corporations who will offer financing for these organs?

If we had the potential to live over a century, what effect would that have on health insurance? Would we be able to have open-ended coverage? It seems to me that providing insurance that would cover all of these types of transplants and repairs would be expensive, not to mention the effects that so many surgeries would have on our bodies.

Although the idea of living past 100, with the help of science and technology is still a little far-fetched, it raises many concerns that we all should think about. Even though these futuristic medical treatments might be able to fight disease and aging, they won't be able to prevent accidental deaths.

It's interesting to think about the possibilities, but I don't think that this sort of technology is something we are likely to see in our lifetimes.

What do you think about this futuristic notion? Do you think it's possible? Let me know in the comments.

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for HealthcareJobsiteBlog and Beyond.com.. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.

Related articles

• Watson Has Finally Grown Up and is Looking For a Job In Healthcare (healthcarejobsiteblog.com)
• HIV and the Workplace - Do You Have To Tell? (healthcarejobsiteblog.com)
• 5 Ways That Technology is Changing Healthcare (healthcarejobsiteblog.com)

A Look Back At 30 Years Of AIDS Research

A look back at the milestones in the 30 year battle against AIDS

It's been thirty years since the first sign of AIDS, and the battle is still raging on. Although many advances have been made, the disease is still alive and well. The first cases took the healthcare industry by storm and left them scrambling to understand the disease and find the appropriate treatment.

Let's take a look back at the milestones in this battle:

• June 1981 – The first reports out of Los Angeles stated that 5 young, homosexual men had all been diagnosed with pneumonia. Although no one could have guessed that these were the first AIDS cases, they definitely raised some eyebrows in the medical community.
  
  
• July 1981 – The New York Times ran an article about a rare skin cancer, called Kaposi's sarcoma that had been diagnosed in 41 homosexual men in New York and California. Doctors were unsure as to what had caused the infection and couldn't see any signs of contagion. Eventually the doctors found that the condition was caused by a compromised immune system and that it was a sexually transmitted infection. For the larger part of the year, doctors assumed the infection wouldn't effect non-homosexuals.
  
  
• 1982 – In May of 1982, the infection named GRID was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle. Medical professionals aren't comfortable with the name, Gay Related Immune Disorder. They fear that they are only seeing the beginning as more people start showing symptoms. Many of the people infected are not gay, and the first wave of patients who are IV drug users appear. By September, the CDC defines the disease as AIDS.
  
  
• December 1982 – The CDC reported that infants have contracted the disease after blood transfusions. This is the first time that it was speculated that the disease was contracted by blood and wasn't caused by homosexual contact or drug use.
  
  
• May 1983 – French researchers managed to isolate the AIDS virus and map the molecular structure. This allowed researchers to study and classify the disease as a T-lymphotropic retrovirus.
  
  
• 1985 – The FDA approves the first blood test to detect the AIDS virus. Although it was used primarily to remove infected blood from blood banks, many doctors started using the test to diagnose patients. Many people wanted to be tested, to ensure that they weren't passing the virus along to others, but there was a great deal of controversy about how such tests should be administered.
  
  
• March 1987 – The drug AZT was approved by the FDA as the first drug to treat the virus. The drug quickly went into trials and the approval process was expedited. Although the drug slowed the progression of the disease, it didn't cure it. By 1994, AZT was proven to severely limit the risk of passing along the virus from mother to child.
  
  
• 1994 – Researcher start to notice that some of the people who are infected with HIV never have developed AIDS. Scientists start to study the patients blood and tissue samples to determine what sort of immunities or other factors as a way to find more effective treatments for the disease.
  
  
• 1995 – An AIDS patient participates in an experiment to try to get rid of the virus. He undergoes a bone marrow transplant using baboon marrow, hoping that the natural protection that primates have against the disease could help find a cure. His body rejects the baboon marrow and he dies of AIDS related complications shortly thereafter. This opens up new research possibilities.
  
  
• 1995 – The FDA approves a new drug to combat HIV and AIDS. These protease inhibitors were offered for free and showed promise of stopping the virus as it progresses through the body. It had few side effects and did a better job of reducing the viral load in HIV patients. It seemed as though the drug held a great deal of promise. Complications came when patients became resistant to the drug very quickly.
  
  
• 1996 – AIDS researchers, Dr. David Ho and Dr. George Shaw prove that the HIV virus replicated aggressively from the beginning of the infection. They recommend a triple drug cocktail, combining the new protease inhibitors, AZT and 3TC, a drug that helps prevent drug resistance. This “AIDS Cocktail” reduces the rates of death and hospitalization in HIV and AIDS patients by 60 to 80 percent.
  
  
• 2008 – The first patient ever was cured of AIDS. Timothy Brown received a bone marrow transplant in addition to other medical treatments. His viral load decreased to an undetectable level. 4 years after he stopped taking the AIDS cocktail, he still has no trace of the virus.
  
  
• 2008 – The scientists who isolated the AIDS virus received the Nobel Prize.
  
  
• 2010 – Researchers have come up with a vaginal gel that can prevent the transmission of the HIV virus by almost 50 percent. This break-though was designed to help women protect themselves, because condom use and abstinence requires the co-operation of their partner. The gel is given to women in areas of Africa where the HIV rates are highest.

The search for a cure for HIV is still ongoing. This disease has ravaged every culture, every country in the world. It isn't just a “gay disease”, as was originally thought. In fact, this virus took the world by storm and sent medical professionals to understand the disease and learn how to prevent it.

I can only hope that the next 10 years will bring even more progress.

What do you think about the history of this disease? Let me know in the comments.

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for HealthcareJobsiteBlog. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.