Shropshire Star comment: No reason to pass up vaccines
Exactly 100 years ago Britain was still in the grip of a flu pandemic.
It claimed the lives of tens of millions of people worldwide – more than in the Great War with all its horrors, which had only just ended.
It was one of the world’s greatest disasters and an especially poignant dimension to the global tragedy was that it took so many lives of children and previously healthy young adults.
How they would have loved to have benefited from the massive advances in medical science we have seen since then. Millions of lives would have been saved, and millions of cases of parents’ heartbreak would have been avoided.
Today, Britain is a safer world for children compared to the days when they could be carried off by a range of feared diseases and conditions that now seem so rare or trivial that they hardly appear on the radar, like diphtheria, for instance.
It is not surprising then that there should be a sense of wellbeing and confidence among parents that what they may regard as headaches, coughs and sneezes do not pose a serious risk to their children.
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And it may explain why so many children in the age range of four to 10 across our region have not taken up the opportunity to have the flu vaccine at school. It is free, and is delivered in the form of a nasal spray, but it is up to parents to decide whether they want their child to have it.
There are going to be a wide range of reasons so many say no thanks. If a son or daughter is a bright spark who never goes ill, then parents might think there is no need to take such precautions.
Or they may feel that even if they do get flu “it’s not serious and they will get better in a few days”. For the majority, that will be borne out. There is no guarantee though – flu is potentially fatal.
And a child with flu might infect, say, their elderly gran. Another concern could be a hangover from the MMR affair, which saw levels of immunisation fall amid a claim that the combined vaccine to protect children against measles, mumps, and rubella was linked with autism and bowel disease.
Although that claim has been discredited and the doctor who made it struck off, vague memories of something not being quite right may linger and have an influence.
Ultimately the flu vaccine is a choice for parents and not a compulsion.
But with something wonderful on offer, why pass it up?
