Vaccination Case Study Essay Example for Free

Vaccination Case Study Essay I. Introduction a.Thesis: Children should be vaccinated because vaccination protects them against sickness, reduces the spread of common ailments, and can protect individuals who cannot be vaccinated. b. Strategy: Ask a provoking/rhetorical question II.Protecting against sickness III.Reducing the spread of common ailments IV.Protecting individuals who can’t be vaccinated V.Conclusion a.Strategy: Recommendation Did you know that some childhood diseases, such as polio, whooping cough, and especially the measles, have nearly been eliminated in the United States due to the implementation of vaccination (â€Å"Lode Tot, Other Cases Prompt Call for Vaccinations† 1)? Unfortunately, these diseases and others like them are now making a comeback thanks to parents who are reluctant to have their children vaccinated. I believe children should be vaccinated because vaccination protects them against sickness, reduces the spread of common ailments, and can protect individuals who cannot be vaccinated. The first pressing reason to vaccinate children is to prevent them from contracting diseases. It can hardly be argued that immunizations fail to protect the majority of children from getting the infection the immunization was designed to prevent. In the 18th century, for example, hundreds of thousands of Americans were infected by a crippling condition called polio. Polio was a terrible infection that caused sufferers to lose the use of their legs. Many had to walk with braces or crutches. Some lost the ability to walk and had to be placed in wheelchairs, while others were so disabled they became unable to engage in any physical activity, or even died of the condition. Polio was so prevalent it even affected American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Schnell 2)! Thanks to vaccinations, today polio is all but unheard of in the USA, and in other countries that immunize against it. This example alone should show the desirability of immunization. Who would want to see a family member crippled to the point  of death from a preventable condition? In addition to protecting single individuals from illness, vaccinations protect entire communities, including both children and adults. One person who contracts an illness has the potential to transfer it to literally millions of others. For example, in Africa a single person contracted Ebola from eating contaminated game in the spring of 2014, and now sources say 1.4 million people could be infected within nine months of the first case (Mansbridge 1). Imagine of that single person could have been vaccinated! Hundreds of thousands of people might not have contracted the virus, and might have lived. At the very least, they would not have endured a horrible period of sickness. This means that when parents vaccinate their children, they are protecting everyone who would come into contact with them, even at a remove of hundreds or thousands of middle-men. Therefore, vaccinating can even protect people from future generations, because allowing contagious diseased to be transmitted also al lows them to persist through time. Vaccination also provides a useful service to a particularly vulnerable subset of the population: those individuals who, for one reason or another, cannot be vaccinated. When the population vaccinates regularly, few or no people can get an illness, and those who cannot take vaccines are never exposed to it. However, when people fail to vaccinate their children, the illnesses creep in, and those