The Controversy Over Vaccinations
Vaccinations are one of the world’s greatest health developments of the 20th century, saving millions of people’s lives and saving children from horrific disfiguring illnesses. Major medical organizations around the world agree that childhood vaccinations are necessary and extremely effective in preventing diseases, however, an increasing number of parents in the United States are making the risky decision to opt out of vaccinating their children. These decisions are based off of misinformation from the Internet, falsified data and persistence from celebrities speaking out against vaccinations. The negative effects of not vaccinating young children have many consequences including, an outbreak of diseases, dangers on children who have been vaccinated or not, possibly resulting in death, and economic strain on hospitals.
Edward Jenner, an English Physician and scientist invented the first smallpox vaccine and injected an 8-year-old child in 1796, contracting him to a milder case of smallpox called cowpox, which eventually caused the boy to be immunized to the smallpox disease. He named this substance “vaccine” which means cow in Latin. This particular vaccine was used for over 200 years with minor modifications, and it successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide by the 1980’s. In the 1870’s, Louis Pasteur, a French scientist developed the first vaccines against chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies in a laboratory setting. Two American scientists, Edmund Salmon and Theobald Smith, developed vaccines using killed viruses instead of using live viruses in 1883. This was an amazing breakthrough, because with the use of dead viruses in vaccines, children who were immunized experienced milder and fewer side effects if any at all. However, the method in which dead viruses were used, proved to be inadequate for certain diseases such as, polio, measles, rubella, and mumps therefore, vaccine developers had to use weakened, live viruses....