How Vaccines Work

As a parent, your children's health and safety are always on your mind. You know the value of safeguards like child-proof door latches, regular tooth brushing and pool-side security alarms. They are meant to prevent everything from minor illnesses to tragic death. Baby shots do the same thing--they work to safeguard your child from illness and death caused by infectious diseases. Vaccines help your baby's body prepare to fight deadly diseases.

• First: A vaccine is given by a shot (influenza may be given by a nasal spray)
  Vaccines contain a weak or dead disease germ.
• Next: Over the next few weeks the body makes antibodies and memory cells to fight the weakened or dead germs in the vaccine.
• Then: These antibodies practice on the weak germs so when the real, strong disease germs--which can be lurking all around--invade the child's body, the antibodies will know how to destroy them and the child will not become ill.
• Finally: Protective antibodies and memory cells stay on guard in the child's body for years to safeguard it from the real disease germs.

Vaccines give your baby's immune system the chance to practice and make protective antibodies before real germs invade. If left totally to chance, your baby's first exposure to a disease may be from a germ too strong for your baby to fight. That's why before parents had vaccines for their children, many children died from whooping cough, measles, diphtheria and other diseases. Those same germs exist today, but today's babies are protected by vaccines.