Yet studies show that about one-fourth of preschool children are missing at least 1 routine vaccine. Most states will not let your child start school without a complete vaccine record. Sometimes a vaccine is missed when a child is sick. If your child has missed an immunization, you don't have to go back and start over for most vaccines.
The previous vaccines are still good. Your healthcare provider will just resume the vaccine schedule. If, for any reason, your child gets additional doses of a vaccine, this is also not a concern. But your child will still need any future doses according to the recommended schedule. Common side effects of vaccines include swelling at the site of the injection, soreness, and fever.
Discuss these side effects with your healthcare provider and ask what symptoms deserve an office call. Ask your healthcare provider's office if it participates in an immunization registry. This is a source you can go to if your vaccine records get lost. Ask your healthcare provider's office if it has an immunization reminder or recall system.
This type of system will call to remind you when vaccines are due. It will also warn you if an immunization has been missed. Always bring your immunizations record with you to all of your child's office visits. Make sure the healthcare provider signs and dates every immunization. Vaccines are some of the safest and most effective medicines we have. They have made many dangerous childhood diseases rare today. Vaccines expose the body to a weakened form of a disease, which allows the immune system to build defenses against it.
Some parents do not vaccinate their children, believing myths that vaccines are dangerous or cause disorders like autism. Parents also cite concerns that too many vaccines are given at once. Despite much research, there is no scientific evidence that vaccines are dangerous, cause autism or overload the immune system. They want to look into it further, and meanwhile hold off on vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC , the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that children get vaccinated against chicken pox, polio, hepatitis A and B, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, influenza the flu , and pertussis whooping cough , among other diseases.
Adults should be vaccinated against illnesses like the flu, notes Dr. Singh, and certain vaccines are encouraged for pregnant women, especially the whooping cough and flu vaccines, she adds. Singh is the associate director of pediatric infectious diseases and the medical director of infection prevention and epidemiology at CHOC. Her research interests include vaccines and respiratory diseases of early childhood in the developing world.
Singh is dedicated to vaccine education and outreach and has lectured worldwide about vaccines and infectious disease prevention. When most people in a community are vaccinated against a disease, the virus lacks a host and will eventually go away because there are so few susceptible people left to infect.
Even if all 14 scheduled vaccines were given at once, it would only use up slightly more than 0. And scientists believe this capacity is purely theoretical. The immune system could never truly be overwhelmed because the cells in the system are constantly being replenished.
In reality, babies are exposed to countless bacteria and viruses every day, and immunizations are negligible in comparison. Though there are more vaccinations than ever before, today's vaccines are far more efficient. Small children are actually exposed to fewer immunologic components overall than children in past decades. In some cases, natural immunity — meaning actually catching a disease and getting sick— results in a stronger immunity to the disease than a vaccination. However, the dangers of this approach far outweigh the relative benefits.
If you wanted to gain immunity to measles, for example, by contracting the disease, you would face a 1 in chance of death from your symptoms. In contrast, the number of people who have had severe allergic reactions from an MMR vaccine, is less than one-in-one million. People have concerns over the use of formaldehyde, mercury or aluminum in vaccines. It's true that these chemicals are toxic to the human body in certain levels, but only trace amounts of these chemicals are used in FDA approved vaccines.
In fact, according to the FDA and the CDC, formaldehyde is produced at higher rates by our own metabolic systems and there is no scientific evidence that the low levels of this chemical, mercury or aluminum in vaccines can be harmful. See section III of this guide to review safety information about these chemicals and how they are used in vaccines.
Vaccines don't deserve all the credit for reducing or eliminating rates of infectious disease. Better sanitation, nutrition, and the development of antibiotics helped a lot too.
But when these factors are isolated and rates of infectious disease are scrutinized, the role of vaccines cannot be denied. One example is measles in the United States. When the first measles vaccine was introduced in , rates of infection had been holding steady at around , cases a year. And while hygienic habits and sanitation didn't change much over the following decade, the rate of measles infections dropped precipitously following the introduction of the vaccine, with only around 25, cases by Another example is Hib disease.
According to CDC data, the incidence rate for this malady plummeted from 20, in to around 1, in , following the introduction of the vaccine. Despite parent concerns, children have been successfully vaccinated for decades.
In fact, there has never been a single credible study linking vaccines to long term health conditions.
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