 Let's learn about the importance of vaccination. While a vast majority of parents get their children vaccinated, very few know how they work and some are skeptical. Over the past 50 years, immunization has saved millions of lives and made once common diseases like measles, rubella, tetanus, hepatitis B, mumps, and pertussis relatively rare. Immunization protects you and your loved ones from serious illness and complications from those illnesses, such as hearing loss, seizures, brain damage, and death. Not vaccinating your kids puts them at risk for all of these things, but it also puts countless other people at risk as well. If your child isn't immune, they are capable of spreading disease to other people who have weak immune systems, aren't vaccinated, or are too young to be vaccinated. Contracting one of these diseases not only has the potential to kill those who can't be vaccinated, infants and people who are immunocompromised, but could also cause an outbreak. An outbreak is a cluster of cases of a particular disease within a community. Outbreaks and epidemics caused by unvaccinated individuals are becoming more and more common. For example, one person with measles who didn't yet know they were sick, a Disney's Magic Kingdom, recently started an outbreak that spread across half of the United States and infected 189 people. There was no magic that caused this disease to spread so fast and so wide. It happened because people were unvaccinated and measles is extremely contagious. Measles has been declared eliminated in the US in 2000, but now it's back. To keep deadly diseases from returning and spreading, we need to have enough people vaccinated to act like a force field. Those that are immune surround an infected individual and prevent the disease from taking hold in a community. It is everyone's responsibility to prevent measles and other diseases from turning the happiest place on earth into the home base of a dangerous outbreak. Vaccines are safe and effective. They may not be magic, but they'll protect you and your loved ones. We are a community. We vaccinate to protect. Hashtag immunity in your community.