Vaccination

Vaccination

Role of vaccination

Over 10 million deaths worldwide per year are due to infectious disease. To combat this terrible of life, vaccination is a powerful weapon and has been one of the great success stories of human medicine. Vaccination is the givens of antigens from a disease-causing organism, either by injection or orally, with the aim of causing the body’s immune system to learn to make antibodies against the disease. The body should then be able to respond fast enough to infection by that disease to eliminate it before symptoms develop.

              For vaccination to be successful as a strategy, it must be administered to as great a number of people as possible, and must continue to be used until the disease is eradicated. Vaccination is not compulsory in Britain because high enough up takes can be achieved by government-backed education of the public. Providing a certain high percentage of the populations are protected, epidemic can be prevented. Isolated cases can quickly be ‘ring vaccinated’ if necessary, whereby contact and every one in a giving area around and outbreak of the disease can be vaccinated. However, it is important not to become complacent. Whooping cough began to increase in Britain again because many people stopped having their children vaccinated after scares about the safety of the vaccine

            Another factor which must be taken in to account is that disease can spread across international boundaries, so it is important to have, in additional to national polices, a worldwide coordinate approach this. This is one of the roles of the World Health Organization.

The smallpox story,

        The most successful example of the effectiveness of vaccination is the elimination of smallpox. Up to the late 1960s a combined total of some 15 million cases of smallpox occurred annually in 33 different countries. The world health organization started and education programme in 1956 and 1997 the last case was reported in Somalia and the disease was effectively extinct. The USA and Russia, although there have been call for the last sample to be destroyed.

                                     Factors which contributed to the successful education of smallpox were:

Vaccination,

•         The virus did not keep changing its surface antigens, so the vaccine remained highly effective. Some organism, such as those causing influenza and malaria, occasionally change their antigens by mutation, thus ‘fooling’ the immune system of those who have develop antibodies against them as a result of infection or vaccination.

•         A heat stable vaccine was developed for work in tropical and sub tropical climates.

•         The vaccine was easy to administer by a scratch technique on the arm, so that assistants could easily be trained.

•         The vaccine was very reliable and effective.

Surveillance,

•         Infected people wearer easily identified.

•         Rewards were offered to people who reported new case.

Containment,

•         ‘Ring vaccination’ was used in the final stage of education whereby everyone in the area around any site of infection was vaccinated.

•         Suffers were kept in isolation until they were non infectious.

•         Efforts were made to trace all contact of those with the disease.

•         International restrictions were made on the travel of those who had not been vaccinated.

                       All these required great international cooperation and financial support.