| Vaccination is Necessary Essay

The discovery of vaccines became the break in medicine of the 19th century and helped to fight the dangerous infections which took millions of people’s lives. All people understood the need to prevent infectious diseases, and for a long time nobody had doubted that inoculations needed to be done. Today, the relation to vaccinations is ambiguous. The disputes between parents, doctors, journalists and independent experts have not ceased for some years, whether to inoculate or not to inoculate children. All arguing were divided into three groups:
those who support vaccination, inoculate themselves and inoculate their children;
those who are categorically against vaccinations, thus, they were inoculated in the childhood but their children were not inoculated or inoculated with the violation of the inoculations calendar;
those who have not decided yet, they read, listen, look for the answer and sometime later they make a positive decision on vaccination.

When the child is born, he/she usually has immunity to some diseases. It is a merit of antibodies, struggling with diseases, which are transmitted through a placenta from the mother to the future newborn. Subsequently, the baby, being nursed, receives constantly additional antibodies with breast milk. However, such immunity is only temporary.

Vaccination (an inoculation, immunization) is a creation of artificial immunity to some diseases. Rather harmless anti-genes (proteinaceous molecules), which are a part of the microorganisms, causing diseases, are used for this purpose. Such viruses like measles or bacterium can be microorganisms.

I absolutely support the need of vaccination and I consider that vaccination is one of the best means to protect children against infectious diseases. The unreasonable criticism of vaccination in the press was caused by “the aspiration to inflating of sensations” of some post vaccinated complications from separate cases (Carely, 2005). The side effects are peculiar to all medicines, including to vaccines. However, the risk to receive a complication from the inoculation is much more insignificant than the risk from the consequences of the infectious disease of not inoculated children.

Vaccines stimulate the reply of the immune system, as if a real infection takes place. Then, the immune system struggles with the “infection” and remembers the microorganism which caused it. Thus, if the microbe gets to an organism again, it fights more effectively against it.

Some people fail to vaccinate their children because some mass media, especially television, conduct an active promotion against immunization as doing harm to children’s health. It is only possible to find 62 sites in the Internet on “anti-inoculation”.

At the same time, physicians surely speak: only the vaccine, which invention is possible to compare to the invention of antibiotics, can rescue from such dreadful diseases as tuberculosis, tetanus, rage, hepatitis B, diphtheria, measles and others. Inoculations should be done since the earliest childhood, as during this time the resistant immunity against infectious diseases is formed. For this purpose, there exists the National calendar of inoculations.

The immunization of children was impressively successful in the prevention of infectious diseases in many countries. Now, the incidence of the majority of diseases, which can be prevented by means of vaccines, is rather low, and the level of children’s immunization is very high. As a result of the success in vaccination of children, many parents (and some staff of the health care bodies) ceased to feel danger of these diseases and asks a question: whether it is really necessary to achieve regular immunization. Though vaccines are safe and effective, they are called into question, and their real safety and efficiency are doubted. However, the only thing is undoubted that vaccines kept life to millions of people around the world, and there is a serious risk that incorrect information will reduce the trust to vaccination.

The current trend of the negative attitude in vaccination can lead to epidemics. The coverage by inoculations of children on the average fell to 10%, and this tendency remains. Today, children are insufficiently inoculated against diphtheria, poliomyelitis, tetanus, measles, rubella, and the growth of incidence by whooping cough is observed not only among children but also among adults.

Prolonged “discussion” of vaccination led to that the percent of the inoculated (first of all, children of younger age) considerably decreased, and, respectively, the percent of not inoculated increased (Department of Health, 2012). Is it dangerous? It was proved by scientists-physicians: when the number of the inoculated population is less than 95%, there is a danger of uncontrollable distribution of the infection. In this case, the people, who evaded from inoculations, are so-called “transit points” for activators, with their “help” the circulation of viruses and bacteria among the population is supported.

Post vaccinated reactions do not testify to harm or uselessness of inoculations. Being vaccinated, people have no disease with all its consequences and complications as the structure of the majority of vaccines includes the killed activators or their components, not capable to cause the infectious process. Thanks to it, vaccination annually saves millions of human lives.

As if in a case with usual medicines, during the immune prevention it is necessary to remember that medicine is distinguished from poison only by a dose. Therefore, the state has to watch that the National calendar of preventive vaccination joined only inoculations against the dangerous infectious diseases, posing real epidemiological threat for the population of the country, and used vaccines that were effective and safe. The immune system of the person is fragile, and it has not been studied completely, and any expert will not be able to predict the remote consequences of each inoculation.

In case if epidemics did not arise, the collective immunity has to exist in the society. It can be created only when vaccination would capture not less than 95% of the population. Otherwise, there is a probability of the disease even of the inoculated children.

The fight against infectious diseases around the world is one of the most serious problems, and, as we know, there are not any simple answers on difficult questions. The mother should come to the inoculative office with her child not because she was told to do so, but because she is sure she has made the right decision. Most likely, she had studied a lot of literature, used the Internet; she had not taken trust the recommendation of only one doctor from the district clinic, she had consulted the second, the third expert before she came there.

Unfortunately, parents are very often lazy to contact the children’s policlinic. For this reason, the society, represented by the public medical institutions, takes such an active and sometimes a little aggressive position, concerning vaccination: otherwise, it will appear that many small children are suffering for nothing in our country. In other words, “the state instead of parents takes responsibility for a state of health of each certain child”. Refusing to inoculate the kid, parents take all the responsibility for his/her health and life on them. However, the refusal of inoculations does not exclude a close contact with the immunologist who is able to observe the immune system of the child.

The most important in inoculations is for the mother to estimate the state of health of her child independently. None of the doctors will do that more correctly than the mother as the doctors’ motto is “throat is not red, go to the inoculation”. If you found the decrease in the immunity of the child, it is better to refuse the inoculation. For the first days after the inoculation, the mother should exclude or minimize the contacts with other children and adults who can potentially be carriers of infections. These simple recommendations will help to avoid complications after the vaccination and protect the child.