#immunisation

🚺💉💪 Nearly 3 million girls have been vaccinated against HPV and cervical cancer in Mozambique! Through a partnership with UNICEF, the WHO, and the immunization organization Gavi, the government’s HPV vaccine rollout reached 95% of its target, reaching every province in the country. With cervical cancer being the leading cancer affecting women of reproductive age in Mozambique, this milestone offers millions of adolescent girls a healthier future, free of preventable illnesses like HPV!

Queensland hit by surge in whooping cough cases as experts blame low vaccination levels

A surge in cases of a deadly disease is tearing through Australia, with one state particularly plagued by the worrying rise.

Vaccine Victory

As the world awaits the development of vaccines against SARS-Cov-2, efforts against another devastating virus bring home the benefits of immunisation. Following extensive vaccination campaigns and four years with no new cases, the World Health Organization recently declared Africa free of wild poliovirus. Once feared worldwide, poliovirus causes poliomyelitis, an incurable disease which can lead to paralysis, but is preventable with vaccination. Pictured, a doctor administers oral polio vaccines in Nigeria, wild poliovirus’ last holdout in Africa. Easier delivery makes this oral vaccine a popular tool, yet it has a major drawback: containing a weakened form of poliovirus, it can sometimes trigger its own outbreaks, especially in communities with poor sanitation and low immunisation rates. Several countries are dealing with vaccine-derived infections, and wild poliovirus remains in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so the fight against polio continues, but this progress brings hope that the virus can eventually be consigned to history.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image by CDC Global on Flickr

World Health Organization

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

News published in Nature, August 2020

I have seen a common argument for it being that “Well I don’t vaccinate my kids and they’re so smart!” Well, honey, I’m vaccinated and somehow I’m still in the top 1% of IQs and have been on gifted child pathways all my life. Pretty much all of the kids in my top set maths class have been vaccinated, and they’re all incredibly intelligent and ahead of the average for our age. Top set English class? Same story. I know it’s only a small sample, but at every school I’ve been to it’s the same story. Vaccinate your children - it doesn’t make them dumber.

Also, on the “chemical cocktail” thing, skin cosmetics have ingredients in them which cause premature aging and even put you at risk of skin cancer, yet you all still love your cheap foundations and fragrances when they are actually more hazardous to your health than vaccines. It’s impossible to live a “chemical free” life anyway - take your ever faithful banana, for example:

And whilst we’re at it, these fruits too:

Chemical free lives are impossible, so don’t use chemicals as an arguement for why you shouldn’t vaccinate your kids. You give them a chemical cocktail every time you give them a balanced diet, yet that isn’t an excuse to stop them eating blueberries.

You’re also threatening herd immunity for kids who genuinely can’t get vaccines because they might genuinely be allergic to them or they might have a serious life-threatening condition like childhood leukaemia which prevents them from getting them. Me? I’ll be fine if your kids bring polio back into countries where it has been eradicated, but they won’t.

Now I’m not an expert on vaccines - I don’t pretend to be because I’m not a scientist (by that logic, most anti-vaxxers aren’t either, so sorry to be the bearer of bad news) - but I know that vaccines have been carefully researched for hundreds of years since Edward Jenner’s first vaccine against smallpox and Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory. Andrew Wakefield’s study has been disproved multiple times and he has been struck off the UK medical record for dishonesty and unethical behaviour.

In other words, he was wrong and those of you clinging to his debunked study are too.

Betty Bumpers (1925-2018) was the First Lady of Arkansas between 1971 and 1975. Along with Rosalynn Carter, she headed a successful campaign to immunise all school children in the United States.

Local women are leading polio vaccination efforts in Nigeria! Amid vaccine misinformation and mistrust of male health workers, female health workers in Northern Nigeria are fighting vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV), a rare mutation of the weakened strain in the oral vaccine. With patience, persistence, and local knowledge, these community health workers vaccinate hundreds of children while building personal livelihoods and reshaping Nigeria’s larger public health system!