Germs and viruses are all around us, both in our environment as well as our bodies. Your immune system is the first line of defense from pathogens, but getting vaccinated from known diseases is a great way to ward off sickness. David Basel, MD, Vice President of Clinical Quality for Avera Medical Group gives us a closer look at how vaccines work and answers the common questions that people have about protecting themselves from different diseases.
How do vaccines work?
When you get exposed to a viral or bacterial infection, it’s a race; the virus or bacteria is trying to reproduce and create additional copies and if it produces enough copies of itself, then that causes clinically significant illness, but what the body is trying to do is use its immune cells to recognize that as foreign and a threat, and then to ramp up production of other immune cells that create antibodies to fight off that infection. What a vaccine does is to give you a head start in that race against the virus or bacteria.
Does it matter whether it’s natural immunity or vaccine immunity?
Vaccines work by taking a small component, whether it’s a protein or just a piece of that virus or bacteria and exposing the body to it before so that the body will recognize it as foreign quicker and can ramp up production. It’s the exact same process whether you have natural immunity or vaccine immunity, so there’s really no difference in safety between the two because it’s the same immune process. You’re just giving it a head start by giving the vaccine rather than the actual virus or bacteria.
Do vaccines protect more than just the person vaccinated?
There’s a lot of people that are at risk in our overall population of communities. Those are that are very young as well as older people. Maybe they have a chronic illness or they take a medication so they don’t have as good of an immune system and won’t be able to fight infection as well as most people. By vaccinating larger numbers of people you can prevent the spread of that disease throughout a population and protect those that can’t protect themselves.
Why do we have to get a new flu shot every year?
That’s a great question. Why with something like a tetanus vaccine do you only have to get an update every 10 years, but influenza you have to get every year? It has to do with how much the infection changes year by year and how quick the infection grows. Something like tetanus is very slow growing, so the immune system has quite a bit of time when it can ramp up production of other immune cells and antibodies. You have that time and you don’t have to have as good of a memory for tetanus, as you do for some other types of illnesses. Also tetanus doesn’t change much, if at all, year to year. Compare that to influenza which mutates and changes a lot year to year and there’s multiple strains of influenza at any given time and influenza also grows quicker than tetanus does so we have to have a more robust memory of that. That’s a key reason why you have to get an updated influenza shot every year. In the development of the flu vaccine, we take a look at what infections of influenza and what strains are happening overseas a few months before our flu season and those are the likely ones that are going to come over and affect the United States. So we look at those closely and recreate those vaccines with those strains and then we get protected when they come over here.
Are vaccines safe?
We get a lot of questions about how safe are vaccines. There are risks in the form of an allergic response to anything that we give, but the risks of something like an allergic response are so much less concerning than the risk of getting the actual illness. For those of us that are old enough to have seen these illnesses affect people before we had vaccines, we have the memory of what it’s like not to be vaccinated. It is so protective and does so much to protect folks, especially those that are vulnerable.
Learn more about vaccines and immunizations.
