The Importance of Vaccination
By Hussain Alattas
If you are reading this article to know if you should vaccinate yourself or your children, the
simple answer is yes, please do!'
First of all, learning some concepts is crucial in order to understand how our immune system
is immunized. According to the Australian Government: Department of Health, immunization
is the process of receiving a vaccine and becoming immune to a certain disease. But, how
does the body actually become immune?
The immune system has several defending lines to protect the body from invading pathogens,
which can cause infectious disease. The first and basic barrier against them is the skin and
mucous membranes. However, when a pathogen gets past the barrier, the second line of
defence and white blood cells get involved.
White blood cells respond quickly to the pathogen that they detect; you can think of these
cells as being ‘police officers’: they are always first on site to react quickly when a pathogen
invades the body. They will look for the pathogen, capture it and surround it, which leads to
its destruction.
Those police officers call for the special force: another type of white blood cells, called
lymphocytes. They are part of the third defence line. Lymphocytes are specialised and have
the ability to organise targeted attacks. Lymphocytes have special receptors on their surface
that work as antennae, which will only respond to one specific target antigen.
After the destruction, the lymphocytes will remember this antigen for next time and they will
organize a faster and bigger attack against the pathogen before it causes serious harm. This
memory ability of the immune system is what immunization cleverly uses.
Vaccination also uses this memory ability. But how? Vaccine ingredients vary depending on
what the vaccine is used for. They may contain:
a very small dose of a live (but weakened) virus
killed viruses
killed bacteria
small parts of bacteria
a small dose of a modified toxin produced by bacteria
a small amount of preservative
a small amount of an antibiotic to preserve the vaccine.
Are vaccines safe?
Now you know that vaccines contain small parts of bacteria or a small dose of a modified
toxin produced by bacteria, so is it safe to introduce it to our body?
Basically yes, but wait, research and testing is an essential part of developing safe and
effective vaccines. In Australia, every vaccine must pass strict safety testing before the
Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) will register it for use. The approval of vaccines
can take up to 10 years.
The importance of being vaccinated.
Not only to protect yourself and your children from harmful, contagious diseases, but also to
safeguards the health of other people, now and for future generations. Since vaccines have
been introduced, several major diseases went under control. In fact, smallpox has been
eradicated by vaccines, saving approximately 5 million lives annually. Over 80% of the
world's children are now being immunized against the polio virus, and the annual number of
cases has been cut from 400,000 in 1980 to 90,000 in the mid-1990s. According to the
Australian Government: Department of Health, since the introduction of vaccination for
children in Australia in 1932, deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases have fallen by 99%,
despite a threefold increase in the Australian population over that period.
I do not want be vaccinated, why should anyone care?
Immunization brings benefits not only for the individual who receives the vaccine, but also
for the entire population through a phenomenon called herd immunity.
In order to achieve herd immunity, a significant proportion of individuals within a population
must be vaccinated against a disease. Herd immunity offers indirect protection for people
who are still susceptible to the disease, by making it less likely that they will encounter
someone who is carrying the pathogen. This also benefits the small proportion of people who
fail to respond adequately to vaccination.
However, In the case of a highly infectious disease such as measles, more than 95% of the
population must be vaccinated to achieve sufficient herd immunity to prevent transmission if
the disease recurs. This leads to a high degree of control, and it is theoretically possible to
eradicate the disease, provided there is no other animal that can carry the infection and
transmit it back to humans, as it was achieved with smallpox.