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| Article - Abstract. To view full article click on the article title. | |
CBHD: Adolescent Vaccines: What’s the Point? -- Sharon Falkenheimer In the last half-century, childhood vaccines have been a great blessing, greatly decreasing death and disability due to infectious diseases. Most grandparents today are old enough to recall the scourges of polio, whooping cough, and other childhood infectious diseases. Visions of children languishing in iron lungs in institutions and of the braces and wheelchairs of victims of paralytic polio come to mind. Some may even suffer or know adults with the fatigue, pain, and muscle weakness of post-polio syndrome, which affects twenty to forty percent of polio survivors many years after the attack.1 And who can forget the distinctive “whoop” of diphtheria, which gives “whooping cough” its name? Yet, today, thanks to routine immunizations, few medical personnel outside developing countries have ever seen a polio victim or witnessed an infant struggling against diphtheria's ravaging cough. Most childhood immunizations are given in infancy. Adolescents routinely receive only a booster for tetanus. Yet the protection afforded by some vaccines decreases over time. Thanks to television news and documentaries, the best-known and most dramatic example of this is probably meningococcal meningitis, which can cause death in hours or leave its young survivors amputees. Full Article: http://www.cbhd.org/resources/healthcare/Falkenheimer_2005-04-22.htm |
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2006 Ethics-Governance.com |
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