HOMEWORK: deadline 1/10/12
You are a writer for a health magazine- you have received lots of letters from concerned parents about the MMR jab. You have to write an article presenting the information to parents so that they can make an informed decision whether to vaccinate their child.
No medicine is completely risk free. Very rarely, a child will react badly to a vaccine with tragic results. Making the decision to have your baby immunised can be very difficult.
Society needs as many people as possible to be immunised against as many diseases as possible. This keeps the pool of infection in the population very low. On the other hand, you know there is a remote chance that something may go wrong with a vaccination.
Because vaccines are so successful, we rarely see the terrible diseases they protect us against. A hundred years ago nearly 50% of all deaths of children & young people were caused by infectious diseases. The development of antibiotics & vaccines means that now only 0.5% of al
l deaths in the same age group are due to infectious disease. Parents today are often aware of the very small risks of vaccination-but sometimes forget about the terrible dangers of the diseases we vaccinate against.
If you are a parent it can be difficult to find unbiased advice to help you make a decision. The media highlight scare stories which make good headline. The pharmaceutical companies want to sell vaccines. Doctors & health visitors can weigh up all the information, but they have vaccination targets set by the government.
