Epidemic Eradicator
A young mother sits in a hospital room at three in the morning. The room is quiet except for the murmur of voices down the hall, the beeping of monitors and the almost inaudible whir of the air conditioning. She sighs and looks at the little bed next to her chair. Her month old son lays there, IV lines and ventilation systems keeping him alive. This was the third time in his short life that he had alarmed Code Blue during his lengthy hospital stay. The mother had contracted pertussis, also called whooping cough, before giving birth and passed it on to her son. Now the disease was wracking his little body and she could do nothing about it. She could have prevented this. There is a vaccine for pertussis that could have been administered to the mother during her pregnancy. This vaccine would not have protected the newborn baby, but it would have prevented exposure to the disease in the first place. But she had refused the vaccination. Now her little boy is fighting for his life. …show more content…
In simpler terms, vaccination is the purposeful exposure to weakened strains of a certain disease so that the body can build an immunity to that disease. The Chinese who lived in the eleventh century used a form of vaccination called inoculation to develop immunity. Most of the vaccinations used today were developed in the late 1800’s. They continued to develop and evolve throughout the twentieth
A young mother sits in a hospital room at three in the morning. The room is quiet except for the murmur of voices down the hall, the beeping of monitors and the almost inaudible whir of the air conditioning. She sighs and looks at the little bed next to her chair. Her month old son lays there, IV lines and ventilation systems keeping him alive. This was the third time in his short life that he had alarmed Code Blue during his lengthy hospital stay. The mother had contracted pertussis, also called whooping cough, before giving birth and passed it on to her son. Now the disease was wracking his little body and she could do nothing about it. She could have prevented this. There is a vaccine for pertussis that could have been administered to the mother during her pregnancy. This vaccine would not have protected the newborn baby, but it would have prevented exposure to the disease in the first place. But she had refused the vaccination. Now her little boy is fighting for his life. …show more content…
In simpler terms, vaccination is the purposeful exposure to weakened strains of a certain disease so that the body can build an immunity to that disease. The Chinese who lived in the eleventh century used a form of vaccination called inoculation to develop immunity. Most of the vaccinations used today were developed in the late 1800’s. They continued to develop and evolve throughout the twentieth