Vaccination isn’t just a good thing to do for self and family, it’s a societal responsibility. This is the time of the year when the issue of flu vaccination gets lots of attention, but it’s important to remember that B.C.’s children need vaccinations for as many as 15 other diseases by the time they get to kindergarten.
A generation or two ago, it was considered part of a normal childhood to go through a range of communicable diseases. Some parents would deliberately expose their children to, say, chicken pox, to get it over with and establish immunity. But those and a host of other diseases, while producing mild symptoms in some, can be more serious — even fatal — to others.
Extensive efforts at public immunization have brought a reduction in such diseases as measles, mumps, whooping cough and their related health issues. Diseases once common are now rare.
The biggest success story is smallpox, a disease that ravaged populations throughout the world for centuries, resulting in as many as 500 million deaths in the 20th century alone. Aggressive vaccination campaigns banished the disease — in 1979, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated.
Polio was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century. Although causing few or no symptoms in 90 per cent of its sufferers, it still caused paralysis or death for thousands. Vaccination began in the 1950s and the number of polio cases worldwide has declined from many hundreds of thousands a year to fewer than a thousand today. A partnership between Rotary International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to eradicate polio within a few years. It’s a realistic goal.
As the incidence of so-called childhood diseases has declined, so has the rate of vaccination. On Vancouver Island, only 68 per cent of two-year-olds’ vaccinations were up to date in 2012, down from 75 per cent in 2008.
Part of the problem is apathy — with lower occurrence of the diseases, parents see less need for vaccination.
Another problem is the fallacy that vaccinations are linked to autism. That idea was first put forward by British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, who published his theory in the British medical journal Lancet in 1998. His research was shown to be fraudulent and Lancet retracted the paper.
In 2010, the British General Medical Council found that more than 30 charges against Wakefield were proved, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. He was banned from practising medicine in the U.K.
Extensive analysis by a host of reputable medical and scientific bodies has found no connection between autism and vaccinations.
Vaccination isn’t just about protecting the individual, it’s about protecting the community — the more people who are vaccinated, the less likelihood of an outbreak. Health officials become concerned when the vaccination rate falls below 75 per cent, the level at which they consider “herd immunity” has been achieved.
In rare instances, problems have arisen because of immunizations, but overall, vaccination is one of the brightest success stories of modern medicine.
“Immunization is a proven tool for controlling and eliminating life-threatening infectious diseases,” says the World Health Organization’s website, “and is estimated to avert between two and three million deaths each year.”
When prevention works, there’s a tendency to think it isn’t necessary, but that’s shortsighted. We shouldn’t wait for outbreaks and epidemics to remind us of the value of vaccination.
If we don’t get immunized, we are not just putting ourselves at risk, but also those around us.
