When it comes to the effects of sickness among Americans, the numbers don’t lie:
- Americans catch about a billion colds each year.
- Every year, at least 200,000 Americans have complications from the flu and end up in the hospital as a result.
- The CDC estimates that each school year, 22 million school days are lost due to common cold symptoms.
Try as we might, sometimes there’s no avoid sickness, but your chances of getting sick decrease significantly with proper vaccinations. Take the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for example. The quadrivalent influenza vaccine protects against two types of influenza A and two strains of influenza B. This is an upgrade over previous trivalent vaccines which often protected against influenza A viruses, but not necessary influenza B.
Every year it seems like new diseases pop up or you here about how the upcoming flu season will be the worst one yet and how vaccines for seniors and the seqirus flu vaccine will become all the more important.
With that in mind, it’s important to get properly vaccinated and that means vaccinating children as well. Here are five reasons to have your children vaccinated:
- They stay healthier: The average young boy or girl catches between six and 10 colds a year. Again, vaccinations don’t provide 100% protection against sickness, but getting vaccinated keeps children safe, especially at a time when they’re more susceptible to illnesses. If you don’t think it could happen to your child, consider this: adults infected with the flu can pass on the illness to others from the day before symptoms develop and up to a week after they become noticeably sick.
Not only do you keep your children healthier with vaccinations, but you also keep those around them healthy. With proper vaccinations, children become immune to certain diseases, which means they can’t pass them on to other children, seniors, those with special needs or other groups which are more at risk for getting sick. - Planning ahead: As healthy as you may keep your child and his/her surrounding environment, there’s no way to avoid 100% of germs. Think about the environments a child is exposed to on a daily basis: daycares, grocery stores, doctors offices, summer camps, public transportation, etc. All of these places expose a child to a wide variety of people and potential for illness. With proper vaccinations, you can keep your child safe in public and in places they visit consistently.
- A good investment: It’s already been established that more than 20 million school days are lost each year by illnesses. Without proper vaccination, your child could easy end up as part of that group. Without vaccinations, it may take a child longer to recover from common illnesses. That could include a trip or multiple trips to a doctors office, missed time at school or, in the case of parents, missed time at work. It may seem unthinkable on the surface, but without vaccinations, you may be left feeling somewhat of a financial sting instead of just taking the time to catch your child up on his/her vaccinations.
- Body protection: While vaccines can protection a child from normal childhood illnesses such as measles and chicken pox, they can also a body for life. Getting a childhood vaccination protects you from getting adult illnesses such as singles or meningococcal disease. Take measles for example. As a result of vaccinations, the mortality rate from the disease has dropped globally by better than 80%.
- Safety: Now, more than ever, it’s very safe for children to get vaccinated. Serious side effects from vaccines like the quadrivalent influenza vaccine are rare and at it’s highly likely the only negative side effects a children will experience are some soreness and perhaps a low fever.
Bottom line: vaccinations improve health. In a given year the World Health Organization estimates that immunizations prevents somewhere between two and three million deaths a year. Whether you’re protecting against common colds, influenza or other illnesses, medicines like the quadrivalent influenza vaccine or seasonal flu vaccine can do a lot of good protecting your child from sickness now and in the future.