A message from Dr. Helena Swinkels, Acting Deputy Chief Medical Officer, and Brittany Deeter, CDC Nurse Specialist, Immunization
Community-wide immunization helps keep everyone safe
This week is National Immunization Awareness Week, a great time to reflect on the life-saving importance of immunization. The First Nations Health Authority and other public health organizations in Canada and around the world, including the World Health Organization (WHO), are all getting the message out that vaccinations save lives – yours and others’.
When you get vaccinated, you’re not only protecting yourself from many different diseases (including meningitis, measles, the flu, mumps, rubella and chickenpox), you’re protecting your loved ones and everyone else around you too. You’re doing your part to help keep your community healthy and well, especially its most vulnerable members – babies who are too young to be fully vaccinated; people who cannot get certain vaccines for medical reasons, such as children receiving treatment for cancer; and people who may not respond to immunization, such as Elders, whose immune systems are no longer as strong.
"Community immunity," also called "herd immunity," is the protection created when enough people are vaccinated in a community that disease can no longer spread. Conversely, when vaccination rates drop, it’s easier for disease to spread from person to person and cause an outbreak. "Community immunity" also protects future generations. Because of vaccines, we are no longer at risk of devastating diseases like smallpox, and in the future we may be able to wipe out others, like polio and measles. Eliminating these diseases in the future depends on getting high vaccination rates now.
For these reasons, parents and health care providers in every community have a responsibility to ensure that they and their children are immunized on time and receive the full schedule of vaccinations required to protect them from serious diseases.
Brittany Deeter, FNHA’s Communicable Disease Nurse Specialist on our Health Protection, Community Health and Wellness team (above, with her second daughter at her six-month immunization appointment), shared a story about her first daughter’s immunization: "I was glad she was protected and up to date with her immunizations when she started pre-school, and felt even better about it when we got news that one of her classmates had been diagnosed with cancer. Young children who are undergoing treatment for cancer rely on the rest of the community to be immunized to protect them against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, because they cannot safely receive some vaccines until their treatment is completed and their immune system recovers. Protecting those who need it is a core community value that I champion in my personal and professional lives."
To find out if your child is fully protected and up-to-date on their immunizations go to: https://www.immunizebc.ca/vaccine-schedules or talk to your Community Health Nurse or your Family Doctor.
Because immunizations in Canada are given to healthy people, including children, they are the most rigorously tested interventions used in healthcare. If you have questions, it is important that you ask reputable sources such as your primary care provider, or visit
https://www.immunizebc.ca/vaccine-safety for more information about immunization. The medical facts are that vaccines are among the safest health interventions available, that serious side effects are extremely rare and that the most common side effect is a mildly sore arm. Due to anti-vaccination myths, however, many infectious diseases once thought to be eliminated, including measles, are reappearing. But these diseases are preventable, and with routine vaccination, you can keep yourself, your family and your community safe, now and for generations to come.
Again, please do what you can to protect your communities’ Elders, babies and other members — by getting all the recommended vaccinations for yourselves and your children. Thank you for doing your part to protect your community!
Be healthy and well,
Dr. Helena Swinkels, FNHA Acting Deputy Chief Medical Officer
Brittany Deeter, FNHA CDC Nurse Specialist, Immunization
For more information about immunization, contact immunize@fnha.ca or visit:
• http://www.fnha.ca/what-we-do/communicable-disease-control/immunization-vaccine-preventable-diseases
• https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/
• Health Canada Herd immunity video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqKP-ETVvrc
April 24 is World Meningitis Day. For information about meningitis, visit: http://www.comomeningitis.org/world-meningitis-day/wmd-2018/world-meningitis-day-toolkit-2018/