Vaccination is the process of protecting people against harmful diseases before they come into contact with them. Vaccination uses the body’s natural defenses to build resistance to specific infections and make the body's immune system stronger. Vaccination is considered simple, safe, and effective.
The process of receiving a vaccine is called immunization.
The function of vaccines is to train the body's immune system to create antibodies that it would typically create when it is exposed to a particular disease. The catch, however, is that vaccines contain killed or weakened forms of a particular disease. Vaccines, however, do not cause us to have the diseases that they were made with. Therefore, vaccines do not cause the same complications as the disease from which they are made.
While most vaccines are administered by injection, some vaccines are taken orally or sprayed into the nose.
How does vaccination work?
Vaccination helps to reduce a person’s risk of contracting a disease by tricking the body’s natural defense system into building protection against a disease that it doesn’t have.
Here is how your body responds to immunization:
- Your body identifies the invading germ introduced by the vaccine as a threat (virus, bacteria, etc.)
- The body’s immune system produces antibodies to fight the threat. Antibodies are proteins naturally produced by the immune system to fight off diseases.
- By producing a particular antibody, the immune system remembers how to fight that particular disease. Therefore, when you get exposed to that disease or germ in the future, your immune system destroys it before it can cause your body any harm.
Therefore, especially for diseases with no cure, vaccination is a safe and clever way of training the immune system to fight off the disease without causing you to fall ill first.
Why is vaccination important?
Vaccination has been used for decades to protect humans from very deadly and contagious diseases such as influenza, measles, tetanus, and more. An estimated 3 million lives are saved every year thanks to vaccines.
Also, by vaccinating ourselves, we aren’t just protecting ourselves. We are protecting our loved ones and everyone around us. Since people who are seriously ill are not advised to get certain vaccines, they have to depend on the people around them to get vaccinated.
This is why vaccination is an important aspect of fighting the COVID-19 virus and pandemic. The pandemic has also had a secondary effect because apart from causing deaths in those infected, it has caused a decline in the number of children receiving routine immunizations, leading to an increase in illness and deaths from preventable diseases.
While many people have received their COVID-19 vaccination, CDC still advises that people wear masks in public and wash their hands when in public places. To ensure that your business premises are kept safe at all times, you should hire the services of a professional disinfection company like Safe From Spread, a commercial sanitizing and disinfecting franchise that partners with small, medium, and international corporations to protect their employees and customers with extensive sanitization techniques.
Reference
Vaccines and immunization: What is vaccination? World Health Organization (WHO) website:
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/vaccines-and-immunization-what-is-vaccination?adgroupsurvey=%7badgroupsurvey%7d&gclid=Cj0KCQjw0caCBhCIARIsAGAfuMwL7gWm0lgsJLvldho-vxGUWZPjx1bnua4X2W73VWpKg3jBspwIkbUaAn2pEALw_wcB