Picture Credit: thelibertybeacon.com
<<This content is not a substitute for professional medical help or information.>>
Throughout my years as a medical student, I have seen parents worry about the issue of vaccination. Whether to vaccinate their child or not has become a tough decision for parents. Although in principle this should be an easy decision but there is immense pressure on the parents of the child due to advent of pseudo-science groups that preach so-called ‘Green’ or “environment friendly’ medicine and claim that a child is better off without vaccines than with them. I find it exceptionally absurd when well educated people support such paradigms. Lets try to adress the misconceptions and try to solve this problem once and for all (hopefully !).
Isn’t Mother’s Milk Enough To Boost Child’s Immune System !! ??
Most people argue that there are antibodies in mother’s milk that are enough of a boost for the child’s immune system. This is true, but only to some extent. There are antibodies in mother’s milk but
they don’t protect the child fully. For example, measles are rare in a 4 – 6 month old child. This is because during this period protection due to mother’s milk is sufficient for the child but as the child ages s/he needs more protection. If the child is not vaccinated after this and s/he happens to be living in an endemic area, s/he has a strong chance of contracting measles and some may even have complications and this may have serious effects.
Like in Pakistan a number of children die due to complications of Measles (e.g hemorhaghic measles, encephalitis, SSPE etc.). And as you can observe (picture dredit: http://www.cdc.org)
But Polio Vaccine May Cause Polio !! Ok vaccinces like OPV or oral polio vaccine is linked to developing poliomyelitis in the recipient of vaccine, but the cases are very rare. 1 in 5 million children vaccinated for oral polio vaccine and 1 in 3 million children in close contact to the recipient of oral polivo accine is expected to develop polio. But if you compare it to the control (or population which is not given a vaccine) the difference is huge! lets explain it with an analogy, suppose someone is playing russian roulette and there are two guns, gun A with 1 bullet and gun B with 3 bullets. What gun do you think the guy must choose (If he doesn’t want to commit suicide, offcourse!)? Obviously, gun A.Why? because it is associated with greater probability of our guy living after the test! same is true for vaccination with Oral polio vaccines. Although, there is some mortality and morbidity associated with it but it is significantly lower than the control.
Vaccines Are Unnatural And For Centuries Our Ancesters Survived Without Them! Let me remind you how our natural system works. It works by evolution. Through out the ages, the organism that could not survive would die and one lucky, random mutation would live on to perpetuate. Is that the natural system of change the modern human being (with all the knowledge) is willing to take? With thousands of years in pursuit of knowledge we have acquired the capability to augment the evolution with ‘synthetic’ means, so why shouldn’t we just make use such knowledge.
I hope this cleared some concepts, For any questions please post in comments 🙂
P.S: There is another polio vaccine (salk vaccine) that is associated with even lesser morbidity and mortality than sabine (oral polio vaccine) but I have not mentioned because I wanted to keep the sinplicity of the post intact.
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