Childhood Vaccination: A Risk or A Benefit?
In this day and age childhood vaccination has become commonplace. Within the first year of a child’s life, they are given vaccinations that cover a wide range of illness such as tetanus and Hep B vaccination or the more commonly known measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination or MMR vaccine to abbreviate. (Recommended Immunization Schedules for Persons Aged 0 through 18 Years,United States, 2011). Because parents have the option to opt out of giving vaccination to their children in recent years there has been a movement to not have children vaccinated for various reasons, such as people believing that the vaccines had been found to cause
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(Measles History, 2014). While the measles by itself can be life threatening another major problem with the disease is it can cause life threatening complications such as pneumonia or even acute brain inflammation. While the dangerous complications associated with Measles are usually rare, they are more severe in adult who catch the disease. (Measles History. - 2014). The main reason I believe in vaccination is because there is not a treatment for measles. Owing to the fact that vaccine was developed and has been put in place as a preventive measure we have seen that the number of reported cases have dropped significantly from a little over 4 million cases in the 1980’s worldwide to less than 500,000 cases in 2014 worldwide. (Measles Cases and Outbreaks. …show more content…
In some older shots there was a preservative known as Thimerosal that was used in order to prevent bacteria and fungus from growing. (Frequently Asked Questions about Thimerosal. - 2015). Thimerosal is a ethylmercury organic compound and because people associate methylmercury in fish with health issues when ingest they believe that the mercury in the Thimerosal is also harmful. However, as shown by research by the CDC, there have been no direct correlations between vaccines with Thimerosal and autism. However when a Parent is talking to a pediatrician about giving vaccination, they can obtain a preservative free vaccine. Furthermore vaccines have no contained Thimerosal since the 2001. (Association between Thimerosal-Containing Vaccine and Autism -