Vaccines for children save lives. Check on yours
During my 30 years of practicing medicine, I have cared for unvaccinated children who died from vaccine-preventable diseases like bacterial meningitis, whooping cough, and influenza.
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Totoraitis on measles seriousness
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis speaks about the seriousness of measles and potential complications, and measles vaccination rates in the state.
I am a pediatric infectious disease physician and am fortunate to have practiced long enough that I have seen many of the most common infectious diseases in children disappear with the advent of vaccines.
These vaccines have spared countless children from time in intensive care units and their parents from watching their children suffer and even die. Vaccination has resulted in a greater than 99% decrease in deaths due to vaccine-preventable diseases. In the last 30 years alone, the lives of more than 1 million U.S. children have been saved by vaccination.
But who are those children? We don’t know. We can never know. That is both the beauty and the curse of prevention. It is invisible. We don’t see it. We don’t touch it. We don’t experience it. Yet it exists. That fact is undeniable. The number of lives saved by vaccination is staggering. And while not without occasional side effects, vaccines are incredibly safe: they undergo extensive testing, at least as thorough as any other medical intervention, and they continue to undergo safety monitoring after they are licensed.
CDC shows fewer kids are getting vaccinated before school entry
Despite the remarkable success of vaccines, an increasing number of parents question the need to vaccinate their children. Data released last week by CDC show that fewer children are being vaccinated prior to school entry. This leaves these children unprotected and enables outbreaks to spread more easily, exposing both unimmunized and immunized children alike.
Perhaps some parents choose not to vaccinate their children because they value their — and others’—experiences more than what scientific evidence tells us. Maybe that is just human nature.
Every day I see the sun rise in the east and set in the west. That is my experience: the Earth is still, and the sun moves around it about once every 24 hours. On my own, I would never be able to determine that it is, in fact, the exact opposite. I don’t know how astronomers determined the way the solar system works. But I am certain that they did not make up a story about how the sun is the center of the universe so that non-astronomers like me would be fooled into believing a lie.
Parents want their kids to be healthy, but here’s what they may miss
Upon graduating from medical school, physicians take an oath to place their patients’ well-being above all else. I can tell you that most doctors take that oath very seriously. Only a small percentage of physicians end up studying pediatric infectious diseases, which is six additional years of training after medical school. My colleagues and I decided to enter that field because we love taking care of children, and we want them to remain healthy. Of course, parents want their children to be healthy too. But some may not understand the data regarding vaccines. Because it may not be their experience.
Vaccinations are common, so it is common for people to have experiences associated with them. If a child develops a fever and seizure shortly after getting a vaccine, it is human nature to think that the vaccine was the cause. But children get fevers all the time. And some children will develop seizures with their fevers.
To know whether a vaccine is the cause of those symptoms, we need to study many children. We also need a control group. If we find that of 5000 children who got a vaccine, 10 of them developed a febrile seizure in the two weeks after vaccination, we might be worried. But if we find that of 5000 children of the same age who didn’t get the vaccine, 10 of them also developed a febrile seizure, we conclude that there is no association between the vaccine and those symptoms.
There were kids who had a febrile seizure after their vaccine. That was truly their — and their parents’ — experience. But those symptoms were not caused by the vaccine, even though to them it sure seems that way. Just like it really seems to me that the sun moves across the sky each day.
During my 30 years of practicing medicine, I have cared for unvaccinated children who died from vaccine-preventable diseases like bacterial meningitis, whooping cough, and influenza; most were previously healthy. Watching helplessly while a child dies is the hardest part of my job.
I agree with those who say choosing to vaccinate a child is a parent’s decision. It is — and has always been — their choice. But it is not an inconsequential choice. It is a choice with one best answer, like whether to use a car safety seat for an infant. Last year, influenza resulted in the deaths of more than 250 U.S. children, nearly all of them unvaccinated.
That is just a statistic to most of us. But the parents of those children will grieve their loss every day for the rest of their lives. I strongly encourage parents to vaccinate their children in preparation for the upcoming school year. When it comes to children and vaccine-preventable diseases, even one death is one death too many.
This story to updated to remove a paragraph that was repeated.
Thomas G. Boyce is a pediatric infectious disease physician at Marshfield Clinic and a clinical investigator at Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Marshfield.
link
