Benefits of Vaccination Essay

Vaccines: Technological Improvements in Healthcare

Vaccines are technological improvements in healthcare that are used in protecting the body against a broad range of diseases. The working mechanism is by enabling the subject to develop immunity against the targeted disease. The administration of the drugs is thus intended to enable one to use their immune system to fight against serious diseases because once it is in the body, it sparks an immune response. The immune response will remember the germ that it has been protected against and attack it every time the germ tries to invade the body (Tan & Jiang, 2016). They tend to provide long-term immunity to serious infections and are not associated with many adverse effects.

Advancements in Vaccine Technology

The technology used in the preparation of vaccines has been changing over the years with improvements being done with every version that is released. The traditional vaccines often involved the live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines that needed the cultivation process (Tan & Jiang, 2016). However, recent advances have shifted towards non-replicating subunit types that do not involve the use of an infectious agent during the production process and have thus been found to be safer. The use of more advanced vaccine types has been necessitated by the need to develop solution in the prevention of disease without the need to use risky live attenuated pathogens that could become alive and cause harm. Furthermore, the technological advancement in vaccine technology has enabled the preparation of vaccines that could not be made previously such as the human noroviruses that could not be cultivated efficiently using the traditional techniques.

The Impact and Benefits of Vaccines

Since the production of vaccines was begun by Jenner in 1796 and later by Louis Pasteur in the eighteenth century, the protective agents have significantly improved health outcomes. There have been both direct and indirect effects of the use of vaccines despite the fact that their introduction has always been associated with controversies as some believed that they were prone to causing contamination. There are a wide range of diseases that children are immunized against in the US today including rotavirus, Hepatitis B, polio, Diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, heamophilus influenza, hepatitis A, Measles, Mumps and Rubella, mumps and human papilloma virus (Doherty, Buchy, Standaert, Giaquinto, & Prado-Cohrs, 2016). The benefits have been noted over the last century in various dimensions with the standard outcome being the reduction in mortality rates across all countries where they are administered. In Japan for example, the number of people who are diagnosed with poliomyelitis has reduce from 5000 cases in a year to about 1000 cases within the last two decades alone folioing the administration of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) (Doherty et al., 2016). In Austria, rotavirus vaccine administration through the universal mass vaccination (UMV) resulted in a reduction of hospitalization by 22 percent for older children and a reduction by 47 percent by younger children. In fact, other benefits have since been described from the administration of vaccines that are not related to the reduction in disease prevalence. According to Doherty, Buchy, Standaert, Giaquinto, & Prado-Cohrs (2016), children who have been immunized tended to record higher IQs in both developed and developing countries. It thus follows that bacterial meningitis tends to lower children’s performance in schools and prevention through vaccination results in improved attention and results in schools.

Misconceptions and Concerns about Vaccines

A worrying trend has been described where people are afraid of giving their children vaccines. A majority of those who believe that vaccines are harmful focus on the misconceptions and have since developed myths regarding the use of the immune-based drugs. One of the key myths that is propagated is that the effectiveness of the drugs can only be perceived where a large number of animals are inoculated. It is a myth that was developed while Jenner was working on the cowpox vaccine and he thought that the effectiveness appeared to be consistent with the number of cows that were inoculated (Boylston, 2013). Some parents may thus be hesitant to allow their children to be vaccinated unless they see other children being prepared for the same. Other concerns involve the uncertainty of their effectiveness, especially when it is not specific in nature. It is noted though that there is no justification for the worries and there is no evidence because recent advancements in the production process have aimed at eliminating the misunderstanding that make parents reluctant to take their children for vaccination.

The Future of Vaccines

In summary, it is worth affirming that the production of vaccines has changed over the years with a huge boost in diseases prevention accompanying the developments. Based on the information obtained about the broad range of diseases that can be prevented through vaccination, I would advise my friend to research and once he is convinced about the effectiveness of a vaccine that he has been recommended to use, he should proceed for administration. With the rapid advancements in technology and information sharing, it is expected that the field of vaccine development will receive massive boost and better drugs introduced to protect people from many other diseases and those that are yet to be discovered.

References

Boylston, A. (2013). The origins of vaccination: Myths and reality. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 106(9), 351–354. http://doi.org/10.1177/0141076813499292

Doherty, M., Buchy, P., Standaert, B., Giaquinto, C., & Prado-Cohrs, D. (2016). Vaccine impact: Benefits for human health. Vaccine, 34(52), 6707–6714. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2016.10.025

Tan, M., & Jiang, X. (2016). Recent Advancements in Combination Subunit Vaccine Development. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 13(1), 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2016.1229719