"Vaccination is the administration of a vaccine to help the immune system develop immunity from a disease."
The development of vaccines and their effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases.
Vaccines: The basics of how vaccines work, the types of vaccines, and the science behind how vaccines prevent diseases.
Immunology: The study of the immune system, including how it works, the cells involved, and how it responds to pathogens.
Epidemiology: The study of the spread of diseases through populations, including how vaccines can prevent the spread of disease.
Microbiology: The study of microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses, including how they cause diseases and how vaccines can protect against them.
Public health: The study of how diseases affect populations and how vaccination programs can be used to prevent the spread of diseases.
Clinical trials: The process by which vaccines are tested for safety and efficacy before they are approved for widespread use.
Adverse reactions: The potential side effects of vaccines and how they are managed.
Immune response: How the body's immune system responds to vaccines, including the production of antibodies.
Herd immunity: The concept that when enough people are vaccinated against a disease, it can no longer spread easily through a population.
Vaccine hesitancy: The phenomenon of parents and individuals being reluctant to vaccinate due to concerns about safety or efficacy.
Attenuated Vaccines: They are live vaccines that contain weakened but viable infectious agents or bacteria that can replicate but are less virulent, causing mild or asymptomatic infections.
Inactivated Vaccines: These vaccines are also known as killed vaccines, and they contain the whole virus, bacteria, or pathogen that has been inactivated by chemical or heat treatment.
Subunit, Conjugate or Synthetic Vaccines: They use only specific parts of the virus, bacteria or antigen to create an immune response, i.e., either epitope or antigenic determinant, instead of the whole virus or bacteria.
DNA Vaccines: These vaccines contain DNA or RNA encoding the antigen, rather than proteins or inactivated viruses or bacteria.
Recombinant Vector Vaccines: They use harmless viruses or bacteria that cannot cause disease but have been engineered to produce antigens for a specific pathogen to trigger an immune response.
mRNA Vaccines: These vaccines contain genetic material encoding the antigen, and human cells use this material to produce the antigen that stimulates an immune response.
VLP Vaccines: Virus-Like Particle Vaccines are made up of a protein that self-assembles to mimic the surface of viruses and stimulate an immune response.
Toxoid Vaccines: These vaccines target specific bacterial toxins by using chemically modified toxins as antigens to stimulate an immune response without causing disease.
Multiple Vaccines: They include a combination of different vaccines in a single dose, which enables individuals to receive protection against multiple diseases.
"Vaccines contain a microorganism or virus in a weakened, live or killed state, or proteins or toxins from the organism."
"In stimulating the body's adaptive immunity, they help prevent sickness from an infectious disease."
"When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, herd immunity results."
"Herd immunity protects those who may be immunocompromised and cannot get a vaccine because even a weakened version would harm them."
"The effectiveness of vaccination has been widely studied and verified. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases."
"Widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of diseases such as polio and tetanus from much of the world."
"Some diseases, such as measles outbreaks in America, have seen rising cases due to relatively low vaccination rates in the 2010s – attributed, in part, to vaccine hesitancy."
"According to the World Health Organization, vaccination prevents 3.5–5 million deaths per year."
"The first disease for which a vaccine was produced was most likely smallpox."
"The smallpox vaccine was invented in 1796 by English physician Edward Jenner."
"Louis Pasteur furthered the concept through his work in microbiology."
"The immunization was called vaccination because it was derived from a virus affecting cows (Latin: vacca 'cow')."
"Smallpox was a contagious and deadly disease, causing the deaths of 20–60% of infected adults and over 80% of infected children."
"This is distinct from inoculation, which uses unweakened live pathogens."
"Vaccination efforts have been met with some reluctance on scientific, ethical, political, medical safety, and religious grounds."
"No major religions oppose vaccination, and some consider it an obligation due to the potential to save lives."
"In the United States, people may receive compensation for alleged injuries under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program."
"Early success brought widespread acceptance, and mass vaccination campaigns have greatly reduced the incidence of many diseases in numerous geographic regions."
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists vaccination as one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century in the U.S."