From: elivingToday
How to stop diseases before they start
(Family Features) As a parent, you make decisions every day to keep
your child safe and healthy, which include keeping your child up-to-date
on vaccines to help protect against serious diseases.
Learning about vaccines will help you better understand why the
disease protection they provide is so important for you and your family.
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Germs, Germs Everywhere
When germs get into your child’s body — through their eyes, nose,
mouth, or open cuts — they attack and multiply. This is called an
infection, which is what makes your child sick. Your child’s immune
system then has to work to fight it off.
If your child has received a vaccine to protect him against a
disease, it will help his immune system safely fight off the disease,
and develop immunity. Vaccines act like, or imitate, an infection. This
“imitation” infection does not cause illness, but instead, it causes the
immune system to react in a way similar to how it does to a real
infection. As a result, your child’s immune system will create cells to
recognize and fight the vaccine-preventable disease in the future. This
protection is called immunity.
Immunity Stops Outbreaks
Immunity is important to protect your child against
vaccine-preventable diseases, like whooping cough — also known as
pertussis — and chickenpox, both of which still occur in the United
States.
If people stopped vaccinating, even the few cases of the
vaccine-preventable diseases that don’t occur as commonly in the United
States, like measles, could very quickly become tens or hundreds of
thousands of cases. Some of these diseases are still common in other
parts of the world. You may think this isn’t a problem if you don’t
travel to these countries, but your child could come into contact with
international travelers anywhere in your community. Kids that are not
fully vaccinated and are exposed to a disease can become seriously sick
and spread it through a community.
To stop the spread of a disease, the majority of a community has to be immunized against that disease.
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Timing Is Everything
When you vaccinate your child according to CDC’s recommended
schedule, you are providing him with the best protection early in life.
The CDC sets the U.S. childhood immunization schedule based on
recommendations from a group of medical and public health experts called
the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). This group
carefully studies all safety and effectiveness data to make
recommendations about vaccines. The ACIP also looks at how severe the
disease is, and the number of children who get it when there is no
vaccine.
Vaccines Give You the Power to Protect
Immunizations have helped to greatly improve the health of children
in the United States. By continuing to vaccinate your baby according to
the recommended immunization schedule, you are giving him the best
protection against 14 serious childhood illnesses before he is two years
old.
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