The importance of vaccines.
Prevention is always the smarter and more cost-efficient step than treatment or rehabilitation. Vaccinations have saved the world from diseases like smallpox, polio, and diphteria. In fact, the reason why we never have to worry about most infectious diseases anymore is because we have developed an effective vaccine.
Vaccines give our immune system the opportunity to develop the tools to fight off the organism that causes a disease without having to suffer the disease itself. In this way vaccines are incredibly important for your personal health.
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| Influenza vaccine is given once every year. |
Adults need vaccinations too.
Despite the success of vaccinations in children, many people still don't realize that vaccines work for adults too and the extent is not only limited to preventing infectious disease. For example, the HPV vaccine is proven to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer in women.
"It's never too late to get vaccinated."
The only reasons why you should not get vaccinations are if you are allergic to any component of the vaccine, has had a serious adverse reaction on previous vaccination, or if you suffer diseases that weakens your immune system.
One example of an important vaccine for adult is the influenza vaccine. It is recommended to be given once a year because the virus changes every so often every year. Therefore we have to retrain our immune system to fight it.
To learn more about other adult vaccinations such as tetanus, chickenpox, HPV, shingles, MMR, pneumonia, meningococcal, and hepatitis you can visit the CDC site and get a complete schedule. Or, you can consult your physician for the right vaccines for you.
