The dangerous anti-vaccine movement: Do you know what it is?
The refusal of parents to vaccinate their children is causing outbreaks of diseases that were believed almost eradicated
Groups or movements, more or less organized, against vaccination have existed from the very beginning of the practice. For the people who make it up, according to El Espectador, some infections are not as serious compared to the dangers of vaccines, hidden from the public for the sake of profits from pharmaceutical laboratories.
Leer en español: ¿Sabes de qué se trata el peligroso movimiento anti vacunas?
They affirm, then, that dubious ingredients have been hidden, data on the effectiveness of vaccines have been manipulated, and the number of cases of children negatively affected by vaccination has increased.
"One of the false central principles of the anti-vaccines movement is to claim that measles is a benign and even beneficial disease", Peter Hotez, director of the children's hospital in Texas, told AFP.
These ideas are "deliberately misleading and false" and have very real consequences, adds the specialist, because measles can cause blindness, pneumonia, hearing loss, and inflammation of the brain.
According to the infectologist Rodrigo Romero Feregrino in a dialogue with El Médico Interactivo México, in the XXI century there is one of the biggest outbreaks of measles in the last 10 years that constitutes a risk for society.
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In fact, according to the World Health Organization, in 2017 cases of measles increased in Europe by 400 percent. That is, there were a total of 21,315 cases, and other diseases such as mumps, pertussis, and rubella, have been increasing since 2008 in different nations of the world.
Although the anti-vaccines are found in different parts of the world, seven of the ten countries most involved in the issue are European. According to Excelsior, France occupies the first place, and it is followed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, Mongolia, Greece, Japan, and Ukraine.
The reasons are varied: "on the one hand there are people and organizations that from ideological or philosophical conceptions of a 'naturist' preach a return to nature, rejecting the consumption of synthetic products. Faced with the dilemma of vaccination, they opt for the natural exposure to viruses and bacteria, even if there is a risk of becoming seriously ill, presenting disabling sequelae of the disease and even dying. On the other hand, there are religious groups that consider the disease as a punishment or as a divine will to which only resignation is valid", José Luis Díaz Ortega, researcher at the National Institute of Public Health, told Excelsior.
Finally, the specialist added that a large part of the strategies of prevention of infectious diseases and improvement of the quality of life of the population depends on timely vaccination, so that the abandonment of it is extremely risky.
LatinAmerican Post | Luisa Fernanda Báez
Translated from “¿Sabes de qué se trata el peligroso movimiento anti vacunas?”
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