Every year the global medical community celebrates World Immunization Day. This is not just a date on the calendar, but a reminder to humanity of how fragile our defenses can be in the face of infections and how powerful science is. Immunization is the artificial creation of immunity to a specific disease. A vaccine is injected into the body - a weakened or killed pathogen (or its fragment).
The immune system reacts to a foreign agent, produces antibodies and creates “memory cells”. When in the future a person encounters a real virus or bacteria, his body already knows the enemy by sight and destroys him instantly, preventing the disease from developing.
Positive aspects of vaccination
Saving Lives:Over the past 50 years, at least 154 million lives have been saved thanks to critical vaccines. Over the past 50 years, vaccination has increased infant survival rates by 40%. As a result, more children today than at any time in human history live to see their first birthday and beyond. The use of the measles vaccine alone saved 60% of children's lives saved through immunization.
Economic benefit:Treatment of a disease is always more expensive than prevention. Vaccination allows you to save the budgets of families and entire countries on hospitalization and expensive medications.
Protecting future generations:we have already forgotten what “natural smallpox” is, because humanity defeated it thanks to universal vaccination. Now our children do not die from polio, which 60 years ago crippled thousands of children.
Safety:modern vaccines undergo strict multi-stage control. The risk of a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine is 1 in a million, while the risk of dying from measles (without vaccination) is 1 in 500 to 1,000 people who get it.
The result of immunization is a global triumph of medicine
The results of mass immunization are amazing. This is the only medical method that has allowed humanity to completely eradicate one infectious disease.
- The smallpox virus, which killed about 500 million people in the 20th century, completely disappeared in 1980.
- Poliomyelitis is on the verge of extinction. If in 1988 350,000 people a year suffered from the disease, now only a few people suffer from the disease.
- Rubella. Thanks to vaccination, “congenital rubella syndrome,” which led to severe fetal deformities, has almost disappeared.
- Formation of collective immunity. When more than 95% of the population is vaccinated, the pathogen stops spreading among people. This protects those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons (allergy sufferers, cancer patients). ,
These achievements must be built upon to continue saving lives. In the future, immunization should not only reach the millions of children who have not received a single dose of vaccine, but also protect older people from influenza, infants from respiratory syncytial virus, pregnant women from tetanus, and young girls from human papillomavirus.
Vaccination is an example of how determination and perseverance help stop diseases for the sake of people's lives.
Using the link, we invite you to complete a questionnaire on the topic “What do you know about vaccination?” as part of the European Immunization Week in the Republic of Belarus.
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