Health

Vaccination in 2013

We keep hearing that an increasing number of parents refuse vaccination for their children. Have they lost faith in medicine or are they overly confident?

Despite the availability and gratuity of vaccines, more and more parents refuse vaccines for their children. Their reasons vary, ranging from the lack of trust towards pharmaceutical companies to the fear of seeing their child becoming sick with some other disease. Knowing that viruses that disappeared from our continent are still present elsewhere, can we afford to take that kind of decision for our children and expose them to important risks?

Serious diseases

Several diseases that used to be very threatening for children have completely disappeared, thanks to vaccination. Poliomyelitis, for example, used to paralyze some 350,000 persons each year until 1988. It was reduced to 1,500 cases per year in 2008, because of a massive vaccination campaign launched by the WHO and Unicef. This is just one example of how vaccination has changed our health.

Other vaccines of our immunization program also participate in eradicating some diseases that used to kill thousands each year. Indeed, to this day, when a rabid animal bites you, vaccination is the only way to avoid certain death.

If vaccines save so many lives each year, why do people fear them so much? Firstly, because vaccines do not treat diseases but prevent them, we cannot see them at work. The effectiveness of vaccination is not obvious.

Secondly, only a few vaccines are effective by themselves (measles, rubella) and most need more than infectious agents, whether alive, dead or synthetic. To stabilize them, it is necessary to add adjuvants to the mixture. Adjuvants also reduce the costs of production, increase the quantity that can be produced and boost our immune system to help us develop antibodies that will help fight the injected disease.

However, adjuvants are a major challenge for researchers because they are not effective with all viruses, and some late studies have demonstrated that the most effective of them could be bad for our health. These potentially harmful adjuvants have been taken off the market for several years, but research is ongoing and effective adjuvants are rare. These uncertainties often worry the population and explain in part the reasons why some parents refuse to vaccinate their children.

The MMR case

A rumour went around in the late 20th century, establishing a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. This rumour was first published in the British scientific magazine The Lancet and that is how it gained so much credibility. However, the editors of the magazine refuted this study in 2004 and regretted the panic that it had caused. This rumour had a huge impact on vaccination as several parents subsequently refused the MMR vaccine, even though the measles can have very serious consequences on a child’s health and cause neurological damage.

Even if parents who refuse vaccination form a marginal group, which only represents approximately 6% of the population, this wave of refusal had serious consequences on public health. For example, in 2008, a measles outbreak occurred in Ontario, and two outbreaks occurred in Quebec in 2007 and 2011. These outbreaks have mainly affected children under age 10 who were not vaccinated.

New vaccines and the risks

Although vaccination is an amazing tool to fight many viruses, it is very commendable for parents to learn about the vaccines that are available for their children and to question the relevance of some of them. If your child is in good health and has already received all major vaccines, you are quite right to wonder what additional vaccines contain, and if they are necessary.

What matters above all is to weigh the pros and cons before deciding to accept or refuse a vaccine, always taking into account the consequences of the diseases involved and the relevance of the old vaccines that have proven effective over time. These old vaccines are the reason why our generation is not concerned with whooping cough, mumps, measles and polio.

Image de Anne Costisella

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