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Vaccinating Children

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Putting Children at Risk: The Ignorance Among the Anti-Vaccination Movement
There is a controversy brewing that weighs the risks associated with vaccinating children versus the benefits that they provide. While the benefits have scientifically and statistically proven that vaccinations save millions of lives annually, opponents have little to offer in the way of empirical evidence to back the claims that they are harmful or the source of major health concerns. By refusing vaccinations to prevent infection of preventable disease, the most vulnerable of the populace: infants, children, the elderly and those with pre-existing health problems, are at risk of contracting painful and potentially fatal illnesses.
The concept of inoculating humans …show more content…
To understand vaccinations, it is useful to know that diseases are caused by living cellular organisms that overwhelm a person’s immune system. Our immune system includes specialized cells that recognize and target specific proteins found on the outer coat of foreign cells. When a disease enters the body, the immune cells bind to the proteins located on the pathogen’s outer shell and spew out millions of antibodies that will bind to that identical protein on other infectious cells. Once bound, the organism has been tagged for destruction and is quickly devoured by white blood cells before it can multiply and spread. The first time a person is exposed to a foreign agent, it takes a while for the body to generate enough antibodies to rid the body of all the invaders, but once they have been created, millions will remain in the system and are available for a very rapid response should that pathogen enter the body again. It isn’t that the disease is unable to re-enter a person, it’s just that the body is ready and devours the disease before it has a chance to proliferate and cause any symptoms.
An interesting property of anti-bodies is that they only recognize the outer covering of invaders (pathogens). This means that the only thing that is required by a vaccine to trigger the immune response are bits of the outside covering of a pathogen, so vaccines …show more content…
What these individuals fail to realize is that once you have contracted this virus it remains dormant in one’s nervous tissue for life, ready to reemerge as a painful shingles rash once the immune system has declined. I witnessed the devastating effects of shingles first-hand when my grandfather suffered agonizing pain as the blistering rash spread across nearly half of his scalp. This painful affliction took nearly a year to finally secede but would reappear for several weeks at a time throughout the last ten years of his life. Fortunately, it is now known that the virus lingers and booster vaccinations are available for those with compromised immune

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