Image by Sanofi Pasteur via FlickrWhy 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.
