You wouldn’t expect your child to win a soccer game without ever kicking a ball. Giving them a vaccine is kind of like letting their immune system practice. If they ever do come across a nasty disease like measles or whooping cough, their body will know what to do.
Vaccines prepare your child's immune system, like a practice run, so it's ready to fight off serious diseases.
Our immune system is our body's defense system, protecting us from harmful invaders like viruses and bacteria. To fight off the invading disease, our cells make proteins called antibodies. Each antibody is specially designed to destroy a different type of invading cell. We have measles antibodies to fight off measles, polio antibodies to fight off polio, hepatitis B antibodies to fight off hepatitis B, and even antibodies for the run of the mill colds and stomach bugs we’re exposed to everyday. Vaccines basically give us the recipe to make the antibodies ahead of time. This is why we may feel tired or have a low-grade fever after you get a vaccine. It’s not fun but it means our bodies are hard at work!
You might wonder, “then why get a vaccine if an infection also creates antibodies?” The answer is: vaccines get our immune systems working without the suffering that comes with an infection. While getting a shot can cause a sore arm, getting infected can lead to some nasty complications. Chickenpox can cause pneumonia, hepatitis B can cause liver cancer, rubella can cause birth defects, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) can cause death. Some diseases, like measles, can even cause you to lose your immunity to other diseases! (So not fair!)
Unlike infections, vaccines are carefully designed to give us the most immunity at the smallest possible dose. (That’s why a flu vaccine may make you tired for the day, but a flu infection knocks you out for a week!) While we can’t plan when we’ll get sick, we can plan to get vaccines before we’re most likely to be exposed and when our bodies can mount the best immune response. This is why it’s important to not only get vaccines, but get them according to schedule.
Luckily tools like the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccines on the Go app make the vaccine schedule easy, so you can get back to soccer games!
This article is sponsored by the Broome County Health Department , a valued sponsor of Macaroni KID Binghamton. We appreciate your support in reviewing our sponsors' articles and hope that their offerings are useful for you and your family.
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