What is the Purpose of Vaccination

It is very important that we as parents do everything possible to give our children a safe and healthy future. Among these endeavours disease and injury prevention plays a vital role. Vaccination is the best way for prevention of Infectious disease.

What diseases can be prevented through vaccination?

Disease like measles, mumps, polio, whooping cough, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, rabies are still prevalent in the sub-continent. India has made remarkable achievement in eradicating Polio by mass vaccination. Small pox is completely eradicated from the world through the efforts of vaccination only and the present generation has not even heard of the illness let alone suffer from it.

Disease like rabies and tetanus have no cure and are entirely vaccine preventable.

Additional benefits of vaccination:

• Vaccination also gives protection to others who are not vaccinated in the home like your grandparents and other family members with weakened immune system.
• Vaccines are safe and effective and all vaccine undergo meticulous review by the scientific community and government agencies before they are licensed for use.
• Vaccines work by boosting the defence mechanism of the body and protecting against the particular disease causing organism. Vaccine contains dead or live part of the infectious agent which when inoculated in the body is not capable of causing disease but increase the immunity. It does so by producing the antibodies and the mechanism is called Active immunity.
• These antibodies trap and kill the infectious organism. Some of these antibodies are there for life time and some of them require regular booster doses of vaccine.