Why you really should vaccinate your children

Ardent anti-vaccinators are making so much noise on social media that it’s hard not to become worried about what you’re injecting into your precious baby. Even parents who would normally follow the governmentmandated schedule of vaccinations may now flinch before that needle goes into their child’s arm. Because the last thing you want to do is hurt your baby. But here are the facts, writes Margot Bertelsmann

IN ANY EMOTIVE debate, it’s important to look at the evidence dispassionately and try to evaluate it to the best of our abilities. Even if we’re not scientists ourselves, we can try to identify trustworthy sources of information. All the world’s knowledge is now available on the internet. But so is a lot of fake news. The more you can find consensus from reliable sources, the closer you are likely to get to the truth.

So let’s calmly look at some of the reasons parents become vaccine-hesitant.

THE BLINDNESS OF PRIVILEGE

If you grew up 50 or 100 years ago, one of your siblings would most likely have died from smallpox or diphtheria, been maimed by polio, or spent months away from home in a TB hospital. Because we have saved countless children’s lives via immunisations (South Africa has just been declared polio-free!), we have forgotten what it’s like to live with or die from these diseases.

Some parents say: “My children have robust immune systems and eat well, nobody has HIV or TB, and we have clean drinking water, hygienic living conditions and good medical care.

So I really don’t need to vaccinate my children against measles – they will easily survive the disease.”

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that this is not necessarily true: even children from well-off families can and do die from chickenpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases. Not many, true, but this is no comfort if it happens to be your child.

Secondly, your children are a risk to other people who can’t be vaccinated because they have some form of immunodeficiency or other genetic disorders or diseases or are too young to be vaccinated. This is because herd immunity only works when enough people are vaccinated to protect a very few who can’t be.

HERD IMMUNITY – WHAT’S THAT?

The term refers to the fact that when a high enough percentage of a community is vaccinated (for measles and polio, this needs to be 95 percent), the chances are excellent that one infected person can’t come into contact with and infect another, unvaccinated person, or person for whom the vaccine didn’t work. (Like all medicine, vaccines are not 100 percent effective: that is why you need everybody to be immunised.)

MISTRUST OF BIG ORGANISATIONS

Unlike older people, today’s parents did not grow up with an automatic respect for our leaders – because we’ve been let down by them too often. This distrust extends to corporations, and it’s certainly so that some pharmaceutical companies have super-dodgy ethics and prioritise profit over people. However, that doesn’t mean they’re trying to make sure babies now get polio, measles and diphtheria again just so they can make extra money off medicines for those conditions. Nor does it mean they’re pushing unnecessary vaccines off on parents so they can make money.

DESIRE FOR HEALTHY/ORGANIC/ HOLISTIC LIVING

Thiomersal. Mercury. Adjuvants. There are big, scary words inside that little injection. At a time when we’re all trying to live more healthily, is it any wonder that we are cautious about them – especially when there are people trying to convince us that these vaccine ingredients are bad for our children? We know to be careful of eating too much mercury-containing seafood. But people who object to the presence of ethylmercury in their vaccines have misunderstood the science. The preservative thiomersal is used in some vaccines to prevent bacteria infecting it. It is ethylmercury, which is quite different to the methylmercury that is harmful to human health and found in some seafood.

Lee Baker, the managing director and medicine information pharmacist at the Amayeza Information Centre, explains: “Very few vaccines still have thiomersal in them, and when they do, it’s a very small amount that doesn’t accumulate and is just excreted from the body. Preservatives are added to ensure that the vaccine isn’t contaminated and therefore can’t introduce an infection into your child.”

Antigen is the word for the diseasecausing things that all of us come into contact with every day – just by touching surfaces and inhaling air. Our bodies are constantly fighting off potential baddies. Some parents worry that the multivalent vaccines children receive – such as the

Hexaxim and Infanrix hexa vaccines – contain so many antigens that they’ll overwhelm their baby and make the child ill.

Not so. Since the 1970s, refinements in vaccines have meant that vaccines now contain many hundreds fewer antigens than years ago. And any vaccine contains far fewer antigens than a normal child will come into contact with on any given day. In any case, says Lee, “Adjuvants are added to a vaccine to enable a lower dose of the antigen to be used that will give the best protection that will last longer.”

THAT DEBUNKED AUTISM SCARE

Years ago, a pseudo-scientist, Andrew Wakefield, conducted a flawed study and concluded that the MMR vaccine might cause autism. Fame followed for the discredited scientist – but better studies since then have conclusively cast his study onto the “bad science” rubbish heap. Scientists now think that, because autism tends to be diagnosed around the time the MMR vaccine is given, they became linked in people’s minds. But remember: correlation is not causation. Just because two events happen near the same time doesn’t imply one caused the other.

Not vaccinating your child is by far the more dangerous option for your baby than the minuscule risk that your baby will have a reaction. It’s seldom too late to vaccinate.

‘I’VE MISSED SOME VACCINES. WHAT NOW?’

If you’ve missed some recommended vaccines, it’s not too late to catch up. Lee says, “Children who have missed their vaccines can have most of them now. There are products available for older children, especially when a child is starting school and has missed the baby vaccines. There are very few vaccines that the child may be too old to have – BCG and rotavirus vaccines are examples of these – but a child is never too old to have a measles and most other vaccines. Clinic sisters can assist with what vaccines should be given, how many doses and at what intervals, to ensure your child gets the best protection in the shortest time. If you need more information on how to catch up the missed vaccines, call the vaccine helpline on 0860 160 160.”