Choosing to not vaccinate your children is not helping them. You are putting your child, and other children, at risk for potentially deadly diseases. Please consider the serious consequences of not vaccinating your child.
Your child is at greater risk of catching one of the vaccine-preventable diseases.
Vaccines help prevent the occurrence of several life threatening diseases. Diseases such as pertussis (whooping cough), measles, diphtheria, influenza, and chicken pox have basically been eradicated in the U.S. but can still be a serious threat for an unvaccinated child.
Your child can infect other people.
Unvaccinated children are a threat to infants that aren’t fully vaccinated, children that can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons, the ailing, the immuno-compromised and the elderly. Unvaccinated children could easily transmit a preventable disease to another person.
Your child may have to be excluded at times from school or child care.
If there was a disease outbreak, like the recent H1N1 outbreak, your child would not be allowed to come to school for fear that they would infect others or have the disease themselves. This would certainly mess up a parents work schedule if they had to stay at home with their child.
Vaccine preventable diseases would once again become common.
Viruses and bacteria that cause vaccine-preventable disease and death still exist and can be passed on to people who are not protected by vaccines. If we reduce our vaccination coverage, the disease could become prominent in our society once again.
Here is a great link that explains the potential consequences for not vaccinating. Many of these diseases are preventable through the use of vaccines. If you choose to read, and we strongly encourage you to take a glance, you would see that diseases that are no longer around, like measles, used to be widespread. So, if the vaccinations were stopped, each year about 2.7 million deaths worldwide could be expected. That number is exclusively for measles.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm
If you have concerns about vaccinating, please share your concerns with a trusted healthcare provider. Your decision could ultimately affect your whole family, your friends and your neighborhood.
http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p4017.htm
I was surprised to see, in your CDC link, how well the World Health Assembly has motivated people to become vaccinated against Polio. From reading your entire blog I am aware that people are hesitant to get their children vaccinated due to adverse side effects. However, are there some people who choose not to vaccinate their children for other reasons and if so why?
ReplyDeleteSome people choose not to vaccinate for religious reasons and some can't vaccinate because of pre-existing medical conditions. Some parents hear so many negative things about vaccines they just make a personal decision to not vaccinate. Others think vaccinations are required to help fill the pockets of corporations, that they don't work and that they're not necessary. All in all, there are many reasons why people choose not to vaccinate.
ReplyDeleteYour blog allows all the pros and cons to be viewed on vaccination. I thought this was a great article to show the negatives. There's so much information on the internet and the article that really got me to think was on the Shine.Yahoo.com website titled 'Why I feel duped by the anti-vaccine movement.'
ReplyDeleteThe quote from Dr Paul Offit that sums it up best for me is "The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk. It's just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better at saying, 'Here's what a different risk looks like.' Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die."
My future children will be vaccinated.
I think that vaccinating your kids is the best way to go...I believe if the risks are really out there, they get outweighted by the benefits!...
ReplyDeleteGreat information...I'm really glad that our children have to be vaccinated to attend a public school. If it weren't for vaccinations who knows what kinds of sickness we would be sharing. There are way too many germs spread in viruses and bacterias that cause enough sickness. Thanks for this pertinent information.
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