Benefits of Vaccines, Part 1: Staying Safe & Healthy
Benefits of Vaccines, Part 1: Staying Safe & Healthy
Vaccines are an important and easy way to protect against harmful diseases and infections. Almost like an immune system shortcut, vaccines trick the immune system into creating antibodies for a virus or infection you have not yet encountered. That way, if you do catch the virus or infection later, your body will have built an immunity against it.
There are several ways vaccines benefit your health and safety on a daily basis.
Vaccines Protect Your Livelihood
The best way to live is with a healthy, well-functioning body. Whether you’re awake and carrying out daily tasks or asleep, it’s ideal to approach each moment with health and wellness at the forefront. Healthy bodies make working, playing, resting, and general living easier and more enjoyable. We can help ensure good health by eating well, staying active, taking beneficial vitamins, getting enough sleep, and staying vaccinated.
Why Get Vaccinated?
Vaccines are beneficial in maintaining your physical health as they shield your body against certain viruses or infections that could otherwise wreak havoc on your bodily systems.
If you refuse vaccination, you open yourself to harmful illnesses that can compromise your health and affect your ability to complete daily functions. Dangerous illnesses and infections that are preventable through vaccination include:
- Influenza
- Shingles
- Pneumococcal disease
- Tetanus
- Diphtheria
- Whooping cough
Vaccines Help Safeguard Those Around You
When you stay up to date on your vaccinations, you are protecting yourself against infection and helping protect others from catching a dangerous illness. Vaccinations stop viruses from taking over your body and help minimize the spread of viruses from you to someone else.
Take pertussis, or whooping cough, for example. This highly dangerous infection spreads to babies through adults who never received the Tdap vaccine. While pertussis is threatening for adults to develop, it is even more serious for infants. The best method of protecting infants against pertussis is by protecting yourself from it first.
Vaccines Help You Maintain Your Routine and the Routine of Others
Similar to how they protect your livelihood, vaccines help you stay on a regular schedule and maintain your routine. Whether you work throughout the week or are retired, you likely have a daily or weekly schedule you adhere to.
Your day-to-day interactions may involve coworkers, acquaintances, friends, and family members. An infection can severely disrupt your schedule, which may complicate the plans of those you interact with throughout the day or week. It’s possible to derail your routine and the routine of others because a complicated yet vaccine-preventable illness hit you.