Vaccines
Congratulations! You are the proud parents of a beautiful, healthy baby! You and your spouse are healthy. You have every reason to believe that your offspring is also healthy. Why, then, would you want someone to poke a needle into her leg and inject some chemicals into her? She is healthy and you can make her stay that way, right?
Well, not necessarily. It is nice to think that you can keep your baby safe from all the nasty germs out there. But too many parents have taken that gamble and lost. Your physician will recommend that your baby is vaccinated against a handful of the most virulent and damaging microbes. This recommendation is based on a careful assessment of the risks and benefits of the diseases compared to the immunizations. Your physician may well have seen a baby with whooping cough or congenital rubella syndrome. This experience, as your doctor can tell you, invariably makes the witness strive to prevent these diseases from affecting someone else.
Many people have not witnessed the damage that the diseases targeted by vaccines can inflict. Therefore, an increasing number of parents are failing to immunize their children because they fear the potential problems that the vaccine could cause may outweigh the potential damage the disease could cause. In this sense, the success of large scale immunization could be laying the groundwork for the failure of ongoing vaccination programs, unless people are somehow reminded of the mayhem that these uncontrolled diseases can produce. For example, polio was universally feared 50 years ago. Since it has been eradicated from the Western Hemisphere, due largely to successful immunization programs, polio is no longer feared and just barely remembered as the threat to public health that it once posed.
The risks and benefits of vaccines and their respective diseases are published by researchers in medical literature. This literature is critically reviewed by other researchers and clinicians. It is available to the general public in libraries throughoutthe country. The judgments about vaccine policy are made based on this large body of medical work.
To educate the public about the critical importance of vaccinations, The National Immunization Information Network was formed. The NIIN is a combined effort by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, and the American Nursing Association. It is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Another source for up-to-date vaccine information is the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Currently, in the first year of life, infants are immunized against diphtheria, pertussis (or whooping cough), tetanus (or lockjaw), Hepatitis B virus, and the bacteria known as Hemophilus influenzae type b and Streptococcus pneumoniae (or pneumococcus). These latter two germs are the most common causes of bacterial meningitis in infants and children. In addition, pneumococcus is the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia in children and adults.