Vaccination and Your Child

Vaccines are so effective that most of the diseases that they help to prevent are now rare in Canada. Canadian children can be protected against dangerous childhood diseases like measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), diphtheria, tetanus, certain types of meningitis, and polio.

What would happen if we stopped vaccinating? In other countries, when fewer people were immunized, diseases quickly returned. For example:

• In 2000, the number of measles cases in Ireland increased from 148 to more than 1,200 in just one year because vaccination was reduced to 76%. Several children died.
• In 1999, there was a large outbreak of rubella (German measles) in Nebraska. All 83 adults who were affected had not previously been vaccinated, and most of them came from countries where rubella vaccine is not routine.
• After a routine vaccination was cancelled in Russia, there were 5,000 deaths due to diphtheria in 1994. In previous years, Russia, like Canada, had only a few cases of diphtheria each year and no deaths.

But do the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible side effects? The short answer is yes. If there were no vaccines, there would be many more cases of disease, more serious side effects from disease, and more deaths. The diseases that vaccines help prevent lead to pneumonia, deafness, brain damage, heart problems, blindness, and paralysis in children who are not vaccinated. Canadian children are very fortunate to have vaccines for diseases that still kill and disable children throughout the world every day. The risks of not being vaccinated are much greater than any risk of vaccination itself.

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