Vaccinations and why Lesson 29 of the medicine course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
1 If the real germ turns up later, the body knows it at once and wins before you get properly ill, which is why a jab protects you for years. 2 Vaccines also protect people around you: when nearly everyone in a class is immune, a germ like measles can't find enough people to jump to, so babies too young for the jab and children having cancer treatment stay safe; this is herd immunity. 3 In 1796 Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught mild cowpox didn't get deadly smallpox, and he made the first vaccine from it; nearly two hundred years later vaccination wiped smallpox off the Earth. 4 The rows of jabs on the little red book are not random: each one is timed for when a child is most at risk, starting at 8 weeks old. 5 A vaccine trains the immune system with a killed, weakened or partial version of a germ, or instructions to make a harmless piece of it, so the body fights the real germ quickly later; without a vaccine, the body needs days to learn to fight a new germ, so you can get properly ill first. 6 A sore arm, a slight fever or tiredness for a day or two after a jab is a normal sign the immune system is responding, and does not mean the vaccine gave you the disease. 7 In the UK babies have their first vaccines at 8 weeks, against diseases such as whooping cough, because babies are most at risk from them, and their immune systems easily handle several vaccines at once. 8 Children have booster jabs before starting school, and teenagers get more at secondary school, such as HPV, which protects against some cancers, and meningitis vaccines. 9 Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known and can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, and it spreads again wherever fewer people are vaccinated; there have been outbreaks in England, Europe and the USA in recent years. 10 The MMR vaccine protects against measles, mumps and rubella in two doses in early childhood. 11 The claim that MMR causes autism came from a 1998 study that was found to be dishonest and was withdrawn in 2010; large studies of millions of children found no link. 12 Herd immunity means that when most people are immune, a germ can't spread easily, protecting those who can't be vaccinated; for measles about 95 in every 100 people need to be immune. 14 Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people; after a worldwide vaccination campaign the last natural case was in 1977 and it was declared wiped out in 1980; this was possible because there was a good vaccine and smallpox lived only in people, with no animals to hide in. 15 Polio can cause paralysis; vaccination has made it rare, and the wild virus is still found mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 16 Vaccines are tested in the lab and then in trials with thousands of people before approval, and their safety keeps being watched afterwards. 17 Travellers to some countries need extra vaccines or medicines, such as against typhoid or yellow fever, and a travel nurse advises which ones. 18 Some families worry about vaccines because of things they read online, and doctors and nurses answer their questions with the evidence. ← previous The hospital ward, operations and anaestheticnext → Germs, the immune system and hand-washing↑ back to Medicine This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/medicine/29-vaccinations-and-why/