Chapter 1, Problem 1QC

What should medical professionals, politicians, or even just concerned citizens do, if anything, to help parents understand the risks and benefits of vaccines?

Summary Introduction

To review:

The explanationgiven by the medical professionals, politicians, or even just concerned citizens to the parents so that they canunderstand the risks and benefits of vaccines.

Introduction:

Vaccination helped wipe out diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, and diphtheria. In the 1940s and 50s before vaccination, these diseases combined together killed almost 7700 individuals. After the vaccination program by 2004, only 27 deaths took place due to all these five diseases that is 99.6% reduction in number.

Explanation of Solution

As per a paper published in ‘The Lancet,’ vaccination in early age claimed to cause autism. This paper was discarded after the person behind this theory was found guilty of serious professional misconduct. Still, many new parents stated fearing a vaccination program and decided not to use it for their newly born children.

Thus, the medical professionals must play a vital role to make parents understand the effectiveness of vaccination. They need to show the statistical data that give proof for the effectiveness of vaccination and convince the parents to approve to vaccinate their children. They also need to understand that when most people of the community have been vaccinated, the pathogen will have a harder time to spread among the unvaccinated people. Therefore, it is important that most of the people in the community come under vaccination program.

Politicians may influence the government to make such a law that forces parents to vaccinate their child. In the United States, all 50 states require children to be vaccinated in order to attend school. More law like this needs to be implemented. The government must also reduce the cost of vaccination by giving subsidy so that poor people can afford them. Lastly, concerned citizen or influential people like actor and actress should make parents understand the effectiveness of vaccination through ad campaigning.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that vaccination is very important to develop diseases free community and everyone who wants to see a disease free healthy community must support vaccination and do the needful to increase its success rate.