Today, most children lead much healthier lives due to the advancements of medicine, which allowed parents to live with much less anxiety and worry over childhood infections. Immunizations are one of the success stories of modern medicine.

Measles is not a mild disease. Neither is whooping cough, Hib meningitis, or rotavirus. These diseases lead parents to make worried midnight phone calls to their doctor, rush to the emergency department, and spend days nursing a sick and miserable child. It’s now possible to avoid all this suffering entirely with vaccines.

Pediatricians recommend and advise what’s in their patients’ best interest based on scientific evidence. While parents should do whatever they can to prevent their children’s illnesses.

Vaccination is a safe and effective way to prevent serious infectious diseases and save lives. Today, vaccines are available to protect against at least 14 deadly diseases, such as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza, measles, and poliomyelitis. Together, these vaccines save the lives of up to 3 million people every year.

Vaccines reduce the risks of contracting a disease by working with the body’s natural defenses to build protection. When the child receives a vaccine,  the immune system responds through:

• Recognizing the invading germ, such as the virus or bacteria.
• Producing antibodies, which are proteins produced naturally by the immune system to fight disease.
• Building memory by remembering the illness and how to fight it. If the germ attacks the child’s body in the future, the immune system can quickly destroy it before becoming sick.

Therefore, the vaccine is a safe and clever way to produce an immune response in the body without causing illness.

Most vaccines are given by injection, but some by mouth. When we vaccinate our children, we aren’t just protecting them but also those around them, so vaccination is considered a public health issue rather than a personal practice.

It’s crucial to understand that there is no "alternative" to immunization. Delaying vaccines only leaves children with a higher risk of disease for a more extended period. It does not make vaccinations safer. There is no alternative if parents want optimal health protection for their children.