The Pros and Cons of Not Vaccinating Your Child - Essay Example

Vaccination against the highly prevalent infectious diseases is necessary to protect the individual from acquiring the disease and eradicating the disease from the whole community as well as stopping its further transmission. Many goals of eradicating particular infectious diseases have been attained by mass vaccination programs. In 1980, the WHO eradicated small-pox worldwide by a mass vaccination program. In 1988, WHO, resolved to eradicate poliomyelitis by vaccination. The number of cases world-wide has fallen from 350,000 to 1651 at present (Colledge et al 2010).

Vaccines are associated with a number of risks and they are also associated with certain risks. However, the vaccines are also associated with a vast number of benefits. Many parents question the safety and effectiveness of vaccinating their children and show concern about the adverse effects associated with it. Proper and adequate awareness should be provided to the parents so that they can make a healthy decision for their children after analyzing the pros and cons. The optimal benefits and risks associated with not vaccinating the children should be analyzed before providing immunization to the children.

All vaccines are associated with side-effects and most of them are either minor or very rare. The CDC develops a Vaccine Information Sheet (VIS) that contains all the relevant information regarding the vaccines. The parents should be provided with VIS so that they are fully aware of the side-effects and do not panic in case of post-vaccination effects. The most common side-effects associated with the vaccines are fever and redness and swelling or infection at the site of the injection. Rarely, headaches, weakness or tiredness and rash also develop in the children.

Seizures, coma, Gullain-Barre and death are very rare adverse effects of vaccination and are least expected. There are certain contraindications of vaccination and these children should not be immunized. Children with suppressed immunity because of any disease or disease related treatment should not be vaccinated at all. There are high chances that they will respond poorly to the inactivated vaccine agents. Any allergies to the vaccine components are also a contraindication for vaccine administration.

In such cases of contraindications, it is recommended that prevention of the disease is attained through other preventive measures (Hansel 2012). The side-effects of vaccination are different for particular vaccines and parents should attain complete awareness before putting forward their children for the vaccination programs. However, the benefits of not vaccinating children are not huge and it is important to protect your children from the prevalent infectious diseases. The benefits of the vaccines have been evident since the past 100 years from the eradication of the variola virus, control of the polio and measles infection and the reduction of many vaccine-preventable diseases.

However, the benefits are reducing as the vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming rare or have been eradicated. Although MANY diseases have been controlled in United States, outbreaks of certain diseases like measles have brought forward the benefits of vaccines. Researches showed that children who were not vaccinated had 35 folds greater risk of developing measles as compared to