The little girl Lia is six years old and last week he stopped going to school, not because the girl is sick and can spread to other children (you know, when you have something contagious, the ideal is to stay at home, so as not to hit the classmates), but because his class goes many unvaccinated children: the unfortunate story of a girl who cannot go to school because her classmates are not vaccinated.
Almost half of the children in their class are not vaccinated
Lia lives in a small town in Tuscany, in Italy, and as they say in El Confidencial, she has recently been diagnosed with a severe form of immunodeficiency. This means that your immune system does not work as it should and that is why it is at a much higher risk than the rest of children from suffering from any illness or infection.
In its class, consisting of 18 children, many of their classmates are not vaccinated (specifically eight), and this poses a risk to the girl because these children are at risk of taking any of the diseases for which they are not vaccinated, with the difference that the severity of the infection would be much greater in the case of Lia.
She is not well vaccinated either
The parents of those eight children do not believe in vaccines, or do not consider them necessary, or think that the risk of administering the vaccines is greater than that of not doing so, and they decided not to apply them to their children. One of the arguments used by the so-called anti-vaccines is that "if you have your children vaccinated, let us choose freely." However, it is still a very poor argument and based on a clear lack of information:
- No vaccine is 100 percent effective, and just as many children get well immunized, others don't get really effective protection, and they are at risk. Therefore It is important that all children are vaccinated, because the best immunized also protect the worst immunized.
- There are children who cannot get vaccinated for different reasons (due to illness, because they are not yet of the right age like babies, etc.) and Lia is one of them. Although her parents would love to be able to continue giving her vaccines, doctors have advised against it because it could be dangerous for her.
Italy is "at the limit of safety parameters"
According to WHO, in Italy there are already 358,000 children without vaccinations, and this has placed the country in a situation close to the limit from which diseases can no longer be effectively controlled. A massive vaccination means that the diseases are practically controlled and that if there is any infection, it can hardly be extended to others. A poor vaccination, with many unvaccinated children, opens the door for an infection to spread and an outbreak occurs, with the risk to the health of each of the unvaccinated children and for the rest of the population (babies , sick and elderly).
Lia will go to another school
Faced with such a situation, unable to go to school by the decision of the parents of these children, the parents have taken the solution of look for another school in your city, and the medical team and parents are considering the possibility of vaccinating the girl with special vaccines, different from the usual ones, which could be better tolerated by her body.
Vaccination is a solidarity act
And it seems that people don't just understand it. I keep listening to people talking about the risk of vaccines, the side effects they cause and the damage they have caused to many children. It is not a lie: vaccines have their risks, like any medicine, and occasionally there are cases of moderate or severe reactions, but the number of cases will always be less than the damage we would suffer if we all stopped vaccinating our children. They would return diseases such as polio, measles, diphtheria (we still remember the case of the child who died of this disease in June), potentially serious diseases that caused a large number of deaths a few decades ago.
Now children who do not get vaccinated have little danger because everyone else does, but if we start not vaccinating everyone, the tortilla will turn around and then regrets will come. It is what you have to live in a first world where diseases are controlled and it is very rare to die as a child ... We lose respect for things that should continue to give us, at least, a little bit of fear.
