Benefits vs. Risk: Yellow Fever Vaccination

Benefits vs. Risk: Yellow Fever Vaccination

Yellow fever is a disease, which is caused by the bite of an infected mosquito and can cause jaundice (yellowing of eyes and skin), fever, flu, liver, lung and kidney failure, vomiting of blood and even death in some cases. It can also cause headache, body ache and back pain and cause the body to go into shock. This potentially life-threatening, viral disease can cause severe illness in 15% of the patients, among which 50% die due to complications.

Benefits of Yellow Fever Vaccine

• The yellow fever vaccination is quite beneficial in preventing this viral, life-threatening disease in adults and children who are almost 9 months of age.
  

• The vaccine has small doses of the virus, which when exposed to your body helps the body develop antibodies that develop an immunity to the yellow fever. However, this vaccine will not treat a virus that is already in the body.
  

• This vaccines is extremely necessary for people working in the laboratory, who are exposed to yellow fever virus as part of their research and can contract the disease by inhaling viral droplets in the lab environment or through any needle-stick incidents.
  

• It is also extremely important for people who are travelling to an area or region that has reported cases of the yellow fever virus.
  

Risk of Yellow Fever Vaccine

Almost all vaccinations, including yellow fever vaccination, have some side effects and allergic reactions. However, severe allergic reactions and deaths only occur in very rare cases. The most common risks associated with the yellow fever vaccination are:

• It can cause allergic reactions and multi-organ side effects
  

• It can cause neurological failure
  

• Sometimes the risk associated with the vaccine, as a travel vaccination, is not as easy to ascertain and understand and is sometimes much higher than actually contracting the disease, especially for older patients over 55 years of age
  

• It can cause yellow fever vaccine-associated viscerotropic disease, however only 1 in every 250,000 people can get affected.
  

• Among travel vaccinations, the yellow fever vaccination is fairly safe and since its introduction in 1936, only 62 confirmed cases of vaccine-associated viscerotropic disease has been reported with just 35 deaths.
  

• Only one in 55,000 people will experience any allergic reaction and 1 in 125,000 people will have a nervous system reaction to this vaccine.

It is fairly safe to say that before traveling, it is advisable to get vaccinated.