Parents have many responsibilities, one of which is protecting and keeping their children as safe and healthy as possible. So when medical decisions need to be made, parents should be the ones to have the final …show more content…
For example, a veterinary vaccine study at the University of Melbourne (Australia) found that using two different vaccine viruses to combat the same disease in an animal population quite rapidly caused the viruses to combine, creating brand new and more virulent viruses. In Australia, dangerous new strains of whooping cough bacteria were reported in March 2012. The vaccine, researchers said, was responsible. The reason for this is because while whooping cough is primarily attributed to Bordetella pertussis infection, it is also caused by another closely related pathogen called B. parapertussis, which the vaccine does NOT protect against. Two years earlier, scientists at Penn State had already reported that the pertussis vaccine significantly enhanced the colonization of B. parapertussis, thereby promoting vaccine-resistant whooping cough outbreaks. According to the authors, vaccination led to a 40-fold enhancement of B. parapertussis colonization in the lungs of mice, and the data suggested that the vaccine may be contributing to the observed rise in whooping cough incidence over the last decade by promoting B. parapertussis infection