Stopping Sickness Before It Starts: Vaccination & Disease Control - Extended

 

What is Vaccination?

• Vaccinations give the body protection against specific diseases and increase the body's response to infections from pathogens without being exposed to the dangerous pathogen that can lead to death.
• Vaccination is like teaching your body’s defense team about a disease before the real bad guys (harmful germs) show up.
• A vaccine is usually a weak, harmless or dead form of a pathogen that conatain specific antigens which are introduced to the body.
• When introduced into the body, an immune response is triggered in the body.
• This causes lymphcytes to create the corresponding antibodies for the antigens. These antibodes attack the antigens and create memory cells.
• These memory cells stay in the bodies blood and will rapidly respond to the antigen should it enter the body again. Long lasting immunity has been achieved
•  This helps you avoid getting seriously ill if you ever meet the real disease in the future.

Key Idea: Vaccines help your body “practice” so it can respond quickly if the real threat appears.

 

How Vaccination Helps Control Disease Spread

• If a large proportion of a population of people are vaccinated, it’s harder for a disease to find someone new to infect. This acts as protection for the whole population.
• This reduces the number of sick people and slows down the spread of the disease in a community. This is called herd immunity

Imagine a line of dominoes: if most dominoes are “immune” and won’t fall, the chain reaction stops quickly. That’s what vaccination does in a population—it prevents a big chain reaction of disease.

 

Controlling the Spread of Diseases with Good Practices

Good habits and proper systems can block diseases from spreading in the first place:

Method	How it Helps
Clean Water Supply	Stops germs/pathogens in drinking water. This stops diseases in water i.e cholera
Hygienic Food Preparation	Removes harmful microbes in food
Good Personal Hygiene	Washing hands removes germs and transmission of diseases
Waste Disposal	Keeps germs away from living areas and decreases pests that can act as vectors. For example flies
Sewage Treatment	Prevents germs from spreading through waste