The World Health Organization’s (WHO) wrapped up its annual World Immunization Week. The WHO kicked off the once-yearly effort to re-ignite the world’s public health agencies’ commitment to ensuring that their constituents’ are immunized against vaccine-preventable illnesses on Monday.
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Tags: vaccines, vaccinations, immunization, World Health Oranization
On Tuesday, I blogged about the measles outbreak that began at two Disney theme parks in California last month. In researching the piece, I stridently avoided using a term that I'd seen in lots of articles that characterized vaccine skeptics as "anti-vaxxers." To me, the term seemed unnecessarily hostile in a debate that, to my ears, seems like hardly anything to debate at all: of course I vaccinate my children and you should too! Who could argue with that?
Read MoreTags: vaccines, vaccinations, science
There was a very interesting article in the Washington Post recently in their Medical Mysteries series. It described a little girl who began having seizures when she was 6 months old, and continued to have them, along with quite a few other developmental issues. Her parents believed that, because the first seizure happened three days after a vaccination, that the vaccine caused her disorder. Most of you probably know that there are people who believe that vaccines cause some diseases, especially autism. This has been widely discredited and no trustworthy scientist I know believes the connection is true.
Tags: vaccines, vaccinations, Dravet syndrome, DNA mutation, spontaneous DNA mutation