Children’s Vaccinations: Safe, essential for good health

August is a time when health professionals spread awareness about the importance of vaccinations by observing Children’s Immunization Month.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccines are a necessary part of preventive medicine, and it is the goal of modern medicine to stop diseases before they start.

As they explain, the body’s natural immune system is designed to react to foreign invaders (called antigens) by producing antibodies to fend them off.  The catch is that often the body cannot produce these antibodies quickly enough the first time it encounters the disease and that it why most people get sick.  The second time around, however, the body is ready for the disease-causing antigens and produces the antibodies quickly. Vaccines contain the same antigens (or parts of them) that cause the real disease, but they are either weakened or killed to the point that the body can react to them without getting sick and be ready for it when encountered again.

Parents have become increasingly worried that the vaccines given to their children are actually causing harm.  According to Parenting Magazine, the parents are often conflicted due to a lack of knowledge about the risks and benefits associated with the shots. In recent decades, many vaccinations would cause a mild form of a disease to appear, and they often contained a couple of hundred more antigens per shot than the ones do today. This is because methods of creating vaccines have become more refined and more research has been focused on their safety.

As far as dangerous side effects and potential chemical toxicity concerns go, experts point to the fact that there has simply been no clear correlation between vaccines and long-term negative consequences.  Most effects are mild and temporary and include soreness, mild fevers, headaches, and fatigue.  As with any other medication, extreme side effects have occurred, but it is still a rare event.

Scientists also point out that fears involving vaccinations overloading a young child’s immune system are unfounded because children are immediately bombarded with millions of foreign bacteria when they are born.