According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, preventable childhood diseases are at some of the lowest rates ever, primarily due to widespread vaccination programs. Immunization is recommended by most major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Vaccine Types
Childhood immunizations protect children from a wide variety of viruses and bacteria. Immunizations protect against viral diseases, including measles, polio, rotavirus, rubella and chickenpox. Bacterial diseases that vaccination helps avoid include whooping cough and infection by Haemophilus influenzae Type B, which causes bacterial meningitis.
Disease Protection
If you don't have your child vaccinated, he will not have protection against the many preventable diseases that vaccines can help him avoid. While many of these diseases have become rare in the United States, this is because of high levels of childhood vaccination, not a reason to cease vaccination. In some areas of the country with low vaccination rates, avoidable diseases such as whooping cough and mumps have come back at rates not seen since before vaccinations were widely available.
Limited Opportunities and Legal Requirements
The requirements for mandatory vaccination of children differ between states, according to the American Journal of Public Health. Most states require vaccinations before registering a child in public school, but some states allow exemptions for medical, religious or philosophical reasons. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids may also encounter situations or circumstances that their child will not be allowed to participate in, including pediatrics practices that refuse to allow older unvaccinated children on the premises in order to protect other patients from these diseases and travel to foreign countries with visas requiring immunization.
Side Effects
Vaccines, like all medicines, may produce side effects in some children. However, the risk and seriousness of side effects tend to be much lower than the consequences of the diseases the vaccine protects against. The majority of side effects from vaccines are soreness, redness and swelling at the injection site, according to Kids Health from Nemours.
Multiple studies have failed to find any link between vaccines and serious diseases such as autism, SIDS or multiple sclerosis. According to the CDC, only one death was possibly associated with a reaction to a childhood immunization between 1990 and 1992. In contrast, two of every 1,000 children who contract measles die, along with one in 20 children who contract diptheria, two in 10 who contract tetanus and one in 1,500 who contract pertussis.
Considerations
Unvaccinated children can pass diseases on to babies too young to receive the vaccination and to the 10 to 15 percent of children who receive inadequate protection from the vaccine, explains the CDC. Many of these diseases can kill infants, even if the older unvaccinated child who passed along the disease survives.
