VACCINATIONS: HELPFUL OR HARMFUL?

Vaccinations: Helpful or Harmful?

Vaccinations: Helpful or Harmful?

Introduction

In early August of last year (1999) congressional hearings were held in Washington D.C. on the question of vaccine safety. Congressman Dan Burton, Chairman of the U. S. House Government Reform Committee, called the hearings.On the weekend of October 2-3, 1999, an autism conference was held at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sponsored by the Autism Research Institute of San Diego, California. Over 1,000 people were in attendance, the great majority of whom were parents of autistic children. At one point in the meeting, when those parents who thought their child's autism was caused by vaccines were asked to stand, a large majority of the audience stood. With these and other indications of growing public concerns about current childhood immunization programs, it is hoped that this review will be of timely interest(Kumar Miller 2007 ).

Thesis Statement

Vaccination cause more harm then being helpful.

History of Vaccinations

The idea of vaccinations to prevent disease dates back to 1796. In that year Edward Jenner, a British physician, noted that dairymaids who had caught cowpox (a minor disease), could not catch smallpox (a fatal disease). Jenner then took diseased matter from the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a local dairymaid who had become infected with cowpox, and inserted this matter into the cut arm of James Phipps, a healthy eight-year-old boy. The boy then caught cowpox. Forty-eight days later Jenner injected smallpox matter into the boy. It had no effect. This was the first recorded vaccination. The list of mandatory vaccinations in the United States include: polio, diphtheria, measles, rubella (German measles), mumps, tetanus, pertussis. Kids receive 21 vaccines before age 1(Jahnke et al. 2005 ).

Ever wonder what happened to the famous young man who was the guinea pig that started the vaccination rage. James Phipps, the eight-year-old boy initially vaccinated by Jenner in 1796, was revaccinated 20 times, and died at the age of twenty. Jenner's own son, who was also vaccinated more than once, died at twenty-one. Both succumbed to tuberculosis, a condition that some researchers have linked to the smallpox vaccine.

Types of vaccines

There are four basic types of vaccine in use today

Killed vaccines: These are preparations of the normal (wild type) infectious, pathogenic virus that has been rendered non-pathogenic, usually by chemical treatment such as with formalin that cross-links viral proteins.

Attenuated vaccines: These are live virus particles that grow in the vaccine recipient but do not cause disease because the vaccine virus has been altered (mutated) to a non-pathogenic form; for example, its tropism has been altered so that it no longer grows at a site that can cause disease.

Sub-unit vaccines: These are purified components of the virus, such as a surface antigen.

DNA vaccines: These are usually harmless viruses into which a gene for a (supposedly) protective antigen has been spliced. The protective antigen is then made in the vaccine recipient to elicit an immune response

Benefits vs. Risks

The debate about vaccines has become much broader than some may ...