Vaccinations

• Vaccinations - Can stop you from getting infections.

  Vaccines stimulate the body to produce antibodies to provide immunity against that disease

  • Usually involves injecting dead, inactive or weakened pathogens into the body. These carry antigens, so even though they're harmless they still trigger an immune response - your white blood cells produce antibodies to attack them.
• When you're infected with a new pathogen it can take your white blood cells a while to produce the antibodies to deal with it. In that time you can get very ill, or maybe even die. To help avoid this you can be vaccinated (immunised) against some diseases, e.g. polio or measles.

  Some of these white blood cells will remain in the blood as memory cells, so if live pathogens of the same type ever appear, the antibodies that help destroy them will be produced immediately.
• Epidemic - disease outbreak that is rapidly spreading in a limited region. 
• Pandemic - an epidemic that is actively spreading to multiple regions across the globe.

  • Big outbreaks of diseases can be prevented if a large percentage of the population is vaccinated.
• PROS OF VACCINATION

  1. Vaccines have helped control lots of communicable diseases that were once common in the UK (e.g. polio, measles, whooping cough, rubella, mumps, tetanus...).
• CONS OF VACCINATION

  1. Vaccines don't always work — sometimes they don't give you immunity.
  2. You can sometimes have a bad reaction to a vaccine (e.g. swelling, or maybe something more serious like a fever or seizures). But bad reactions are very rare.
  3. It can be expensive to make vaccines and carry out vaccination programmes.
• Some people are concerned that using whole pathogens in vaccines (even though they are dead, weakened or inactive) could still cause disease.

  Some vaccines therefore only use parts of cells, to avoid these concerns.