The American Academy of Pediatrics is really in the forefront as they should be in the prevention of pediatric injuries, pediatric illnesses. One of the things that I’m a big proponent of is educating people about vaccines and giving them the correct information. There’s so much garbage out there on the internet right now urging parents not to vaccinate their children.
Some have been led to believe that their vaccination is going to cause them some injury or illness, cause Autism or some other disease, which is not the case. There is ample proof and evidence out there that there is no correlation between vaccines and these internet myths that are floating around out there.
Finally, the American Academy of Pediatrics has launched a project, a campaign to really bring about awareness of why we have these vaccines, why they are so valuable. I think part of it is that we just don’t have the cultural memory anymore to remember that our grandparents lost siblings to preventable illnesses, the illnesses that are vaccinated for today. These illnesses caused their siblings to die in early stages of their lives and why should we not be protecting our children in the same way? This just goes to show that people just don’t remember these things. They don’t remember the horror of the time when you had a family; you expected, it was almost unheard of not to lose a child at some point in your life as a parent. What a horrible thing to face up to and know kind of in your core that one of your children is likely to die before they reach adulthood because of these illnesses that are so common in that time frame.
Now, we have these vaccines that have largely eradicated or prevented these illnesses from becoming severe in this day and age. Talking about things like polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, all of these diseases out there that could stage a comeback if we lose the immunity that is brought about by widespread vaccinations. We see some of these illnesses making a comeback and on the rise because of relaxed vaccination schedules by parents because they are so afraid that something’s going to happen to their child, they’re going to become autistic because of the vaccine and that’s just not true.
These things are out there on the internet and I think It’s important for us as medical professionals along with the American Academy of Pediatrics to raise awareness in our patients and in our communities and not let celebrities with their own agenda and their own personal tragic stories that they have some anecdotal evidence that there might be a cause for their child illness. They come on because of their celebrity power and act as if they have factual information and they don’t. It’s a shame that this is the case but we’re putting many many children at risk because of bad medical information, bad research and bad science being promoted as the truth.
We as medical professionals can promote good science – if you have a blog, a website, if you have a forum with which to promote these things, promote good science, promote factual information, promote links to credible resources like the Centers for Disease Control. We can do a lot to change what people are finding out there when they go to search for vaccine safety because right now, they search for vaccine safety and all the crackpot sites come up first in the search engines. We need to go ahead and provide enough other resources out there to start drowning out the noise that is covering up good information.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is starting a whole campaign called Protect Tomorrow to talk about these diseases, these preventable illnesses that the vaccines take care of. I’m looking forward to seeing more about this. We’ll be linking to these things in the future and I’m hoping that we will be able to continue to promote this initiative on this show and the other programs that I’m associated with and maybe we can have some experts on to talk about that in a future episode.
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This news story is featured in the Nursing Show podcast episode, Atrial Flutter Nurse Review and Episode 133.
