Why are vaccines important

Nowadays, oftentimes it is hard to understand how important vaccination is since many diseases became exceptionally rare exactly thanks to vaccines. For example, measles. Before elaboration and dissemination of the measles vaccine in 1963 almost all children aged below 15 got infected. Nowadays most doctors have not even seen a measles case. In 2019 and 2020 because of omissions in the measles immunization in Bulgaria there was a huge epidemic outburst with 1488 sick people (mainly children) and 2 death cases.

Adults also need vaccines. As age progresses, the risk of potentially serious pulmonary infections also increases since immune system naturally weakens as time passes by. Vaccine act in teaching the immune system how to recognize the virus or bacteria and protect from these thus lowering the probability of getting sick.

Most vaccine-preventable infectious diseases get disseminated from a person to a person meaning that if a person in particular community gets sick, he could disseminate the disease among the others.

Elderly people, people with weakened immune system or with certain chronic diseases such as asthma or Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are especially vulnerable to infectious diseases. In the case of people aged over 65 who live with COPD, the risk of catching pneumococcal pneumonia is 7,7 times higher and the people with asthma are exposed to 5,9 times higher risk. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention people could contribute for stopping the dissemination of particular diseases via vaccination.

If the prevailing part of population is vaccinated, the probability of vaccine-preventable diseases’ dissemination strongly declines.