Should I Vaccinate My Childhood

Improved Essays
Doctor Robert W. Sears, author of The Vaccination Book: Making the Right Decisions for Your Child, once said, “With the growing mistrust of vaccinations... more and more parents are saying no to vaccines. Illnesses that are very rare right now, that most parents don’t have to fear...” Vaccines have been used for decades, and have continued to change and advance as the scientific field has gained more knowledge on defeating a multitude of diseases and sicknesses. The question is how are vaccines affecting a community? Some of the most well-known diseases with elaborate vaccines well ahead of their time are smallpox, and polio, which helped shape the community of today. Smallpox, also called variola major, was one of the world’s deadliest plagues, …show more content…
Jini Patel Thompson, disease expert and author of Should I Vaccinate My Child?, stated that starting as early as 1839, there was an epidemic that “swept through England and …show more content…
Also by 1970 “more sophisticated smallpox vaccines were developed” and international vaccination programs, such as the World Health Organization took the vaccine to the ends of the earth and “eliminated smallpox worldwide”. Jenner’s findings in his vaccine with smallpox sparked interest in scientists all over. Doctor Jonas Salk and Doctor Albert Sabin had a competition with poliomyelitis, or polio, to see who could find the cure. In Smallpox, Syphilis and Salvation: Medical Breakthroughs That Changed the World by Sherly Ann Persson, researcher and former nurse, wrote in her book that polio is very transmittable from human-to-human “through the mouth due to faecally contaminated water or food.” The incubation period of polio can last from three to thirty-five days, enough time to infect a whole neighborhood without any knowledge of the event. The Britannica Encyclopedia, a global education publisher, gave an outline of the general symptoms that a patient would feel are “fever, nausea, fatigue, and muscle pains and spasms”; normal symptoms for a cold or flu, but these symptoms can sometimes be “followed by more serious and permanent paralysis of

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