Currently, many parents choose not to vaccinate their little ones, for various reasons.
According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, in the US, the number of parents who choose not to administer the required vaccines to their children due to non-medical reasons such as religious or philosophical beliefs, increased between 2005 and 2011.
It is a fact that not only in the United States but throughout the world, including Mexico, anti-vaccine groups are more numerous and more capable of expressing their doubts. An article by Saad Omer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta comments that “this anti-vaccine movement is becoming a little more common.” And one of the possible reasons is that it is believed that the use of vaccines could be related to the development of autism in 1 in 110 children.
David Moreno, Coordinator of the Vaccine Advisory Committee of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics, comments that? It is important to explain to the parents of children who are not vaccinated that they have proven time and time again that they are effective and safe. That with vaccines, infections such as smallpox have been eradicated from the world and polio is about to be eradicated. There are very few cases of rubella, mumps, tetanus, meningococcal C, etc. There are no longer children infected with the hepatitis B virus whose mothers are infected. And all this is thanks to vaccines. Vaccines, together with the purification of water, has been the greatest discovery in the history of Medicine.?
Why is it important to vaccinate children?
It is simple? Vaccines serve to prevent certain dangerous infectious diseases, activating our body to develop specific defenses against them. In addition, they “teach” the immune system to defend itself against these infections, and in the case of not receiving them, these infections can produce serious complications or sequelae and even cause death », Moreno responds.