Writings - Freelance Articles
Immunization and You
Munson Healthcare - July 16, 1999
Wonder why you should get your children vaccinated?
Just ask Chris Wilson, R.N.C., a staff nurse at Munson Medical Center.
Wilson typically sees several children with chicken pox at Munson each year. Often the children’s sores become infected, and they occasionally develop encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. While the conditions are treatable, the symptoms can make for an uncomfortable week or so for both the children and their parents.
“We see a number of those kids every year who are in here miserable with an infection,” Wilson said. “We don’t see too much of the others anymore because they’re immunized.”
One disease Wilson said she is happy to see less of is meningitis, a sister disease to encephalitis that attacks the spinal cord instead of the brain. The disease is often brought on by the hemophilus virus, which infant vaccines have sharply reduced in the United States. Also down are the rates of cerebral palsy and other speech and learning deficits in children caused by hemophilus.
Dr. Michael Collins, medical director for the Grand Traverse County Health Department, has medical and personal experience with the diseases that vaccines can prevent.
“I grew up in a time when we all got the diseases, and our mothers worried about polio because the vaccines didn’t exist,” said Collins, 56.
Collins found a more timely reason for vaccinations in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. An article there reviewed New York State’s experience during its last measles epidemic. Dozens of people died and many more were hospitalized during a time when widespread vaccinations had already reduced the overall risk. Children who had not been vaccinated, often because their parents were philosophically opposed to vaccinations, were about 35 times more likely to get the disease, according to the study.
“It was still a relatively rare thing, even in the unvaccinated kids, but it was obviously a major risk factor to not be vaccinated,” Collins said. “If it happens to sweep through your community and you’re not vaccinated, then you’re at significantly greater risk.”
Collins also notes that vaccinations are a more proactive way of fighting diseases, by stimulating the body’s own immune response, than the antibiotics which doctors and hospitals use to treat illnesses after the fact.
“The strategy of using antibiotics is losing its luster as many organisms develop resistance faster than the pharmaceutical companies can come out with new antibiotics,” he said.
Vaccination strategies are always being fine-tuned, and this year is no exception. As of January 2000, children between 15 months and five years old will be required to show proof of immunity from chicken pox. As of January 2002, children going in to new school districts will also be required to show proof.
On the other hand, the recommendations are being relaxed for the polio vaccine.
With no wild cases of polio occurring in the United States, a new recommendation for giving the virus is being developed. While the current recommendation is for a child’s first two polio vaccines to be by shot with a dead version of the virus, followed by two oral doses involving portions of the live virus, disease control specialists are now leaning toward a recommendation that all four shots use the dead virus. While less effective, the dead virus has fewer side effects. In extremely rare instances, the oral vaccine can actually cause polio.
In 1996, Michigan ranked dead last nationwide for immunizing children 19 to 35 months old in 1996, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since then, a statewide immunization database has been established to allow medical professionals to access a child’s immunization history online.
Munson Healthcare offers free immunizations to under-insured children from birth to 18 years old. The free Healthy Futures program for any pregnant woman and children up to age 2 offers medical support for a wide range of topics including immunization.
“As a program, Healthy Futures tries to insure families with small children have access to health care resources for a variety of different health care needs of children, and one is immunization,” said Betsy Hardy, Healthy Futures’ program coordinator.
For more information, call Munson Healthcare at 1-800-4-MUNSON (800-468-6766).