Although your doctor's office will also keep track, people change doctors, records get lost, and the person ultimately responsible for keeping track of your child's immunizations is you. Ask your child's doctor for an immunization record form. Think about your child's record as you would a birth certificate and keep it with your other essential documents. You can also download an easy-to-read immunization schedule and record form at the CDC website.
Even though most parents and doctors do a good job of keeping up with immunizations, studies show that about one-fourth of preschool children are missing at least one routine vaccination. Most states will not let your child start school without a complete immunization record.
Sometimes a vaccination is missed when a child is sick. If your child has missed an immunization, you don't have to go back and start over for most vaccines.
The previous immunizations are still good. Your doctor will just resume the immunization schedule. It can be hard to watch kids get a shot, but the short-term pain is nothing compared with suffering through a potentially deadly bout of diphtheria , whooping cough , or measles.
Vaccinations are intended to help keep healthy kids healthy. Because vaccines work by protecting the body before disease strikes, if you wait until your child gets sick, it will be too late for the vaccine to work. The best time to immunize kids is when they're healthy. In rare cases, immunizations can trigger more serious problems, such as seizures or severe allergic reactions.
If your child has a history of allergies to food or medicine, or has had a problem with a vaccine before, let the doctor know before any vaccines are given. Every year, millions of kids are safely vaccinated and very few experience serious side effects.
Research continually improves the safety of immunizations. The American Academy of Pediatrics AAP now advises doctors to use a diphtheria, tetanus , and pertussis vaccine that includes only specific parts of the pertussis cell instead of the entire killed cell. This vaccine, called DTaP, has been associated with even fewer side effects. Numerous studies have found no link between vaccines and autism a developmental disorder that's characterized by mild to severe impairment of communication and social interaction skills.
Likewise, a groundbreaking report from the Institute of Medicine IOM found that thimerosal an organic mercury compound that's been used as a preservative in vaccines since the s does not cause autism. Still, some parents have opted not to have their children immunized, putting them at great risk of contracting deadly diseases. The MMR vaccine, especially, has come under fire even though many scientific reports have found no evidence linking the vaccine to autism.
In fact, the study that suggested a possible link between autism and the MMR vaccine was retracted in and the doctor who published it lost his medical license. There's also no reason to believe that thimerosal is linked to autism, according to the IOM report. Still, in an effort to reduce childhood exposure to mercury and other heavy metals, thimerosal began being removed from kids' vaccines in Now, vaccines for infants and young children contain no or very little thimerosal. And recent studies have not shown any cognitive and behavioral problems in babies who might have received these thimerosal-containing vaccines.
So what could explain the increased rates of autism in recent years? For one thing, there's a broader definition of autism that can be applied to more kids who show varying degrees of symptoms. A greater awareness of the condition among health professionals also has led to more diagnoses. And although the number of children diagnosed with autism may be increasing, the rates of MMR vaccination are not. In London, diagnoses of autistic disorders have been on the rise since , but rates of MMR vaccination haven't increased since routine MMR vaccination began in Also, the average age of diagnosis of autism has been found to be the same both in children who have and who have not received the MMR vaccine.
What many researchers are discovering is that subtle symptoms of autism are often present before a child's first birthday — sometimes even in early infancy — but often go unnoticed until the symptoms are more obvious to parents.
Rotavirus is one of the most common causes of diarrhea in young children. In , a rotavirus vaccine was taken off the market because it was linked to an increased risk for intussusception , a type of bowel obstruction, in babies. However, two different rotavirus vaccines RotaTeq and Rotarix are now available and are very safe. Some studies suggest that they have a very small increased risk for intussusception, but that problem is rare.
These vaccines have been shown to prevent most cases of rotavirus infection and almost all of the severe cases. The vaccine is now on the regular immunization schedule to be given orally to infants as a liquid during standard vaccination visits — RotaTeq at ages 2 months, 4 months, and 6 months, or Rotarix at ages 2 months and 4 months. Your doctor will have the most current information. There are concerns, many of which circulate on the Internet, linking some vaccines to multiple sclerosis, sudden infant death syndrome SIDS , and other problems.
To date, studies have failed to show any connection between immunizations and these conditions. Diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States, like measles and polio, still exist in other parts of the world.
There have already been some successful examples of immunisation bringing some diseases under control. Both smallpox and polio , which were once common in the UK, are no longer a threat. The WHO declared smallpox wiped out in December thanks to a focused effort to immunise against the disease across the world. It declared Europe free from polio in The World Health Organization WHO states: 'The 2 public health interventions that have had the greatest impact on the world's health are clean water and vaccines.
As children develop they're exposed to many risks, one of these risks being infections. Most of these will cause mild illnesses. However, despite great medical advances, infection can still cause severe illness, disability and, at times, death. Before vaccines were available, many children in the UK died from diseases such as whooping cough, measles and polio. Despite successful immunisation programmes, the diseases that vaccines protect against do still exist. The benefit of immunisation is that your child has the best possible protection against dangerous diseases.
This can give you peace of mind. When enough people are immunised against an infection, it's more difficult for it to be spread to those who are not immunised.
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