Vaccines are one of the most incredible aspects of modern medicine. Through rigorous research, medical and biochemical professionals can identify a way to stop someone from contracting a disease without their body first having to fight it off.
Usually, the human body has to directly experience a virus to learn to defend against it. Vaccines remove that requirement and have effectively protected generations of children from diseases like whooping cough and polio.
Unfortunately, while the vast majority of people benefit from vaccinations, sometimes getting immunizations leads to tragic consequences. When might a vaccine cause permanent injury?
Some children can experience swelling of the brain after an immunization
For years, parents struggling to cope with the recent diagnosis of their child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder would go online and discover that vaccines were to blame. Part of that was due to faulty research.
However, one of the reasons this inaccurate theory gained so much traction is that vaccines do, in extremely rare cases, cause injury to the brain of the person receiving the shot. Over two decades of data indicate that only 57 people developed acute encephalitis after immunization. That’s out of millions of children receiving those shots in the United States over those years.
Encephalopathy/encephalitis is the medical term for severe swelling of the brain. Left unchecked, it can cause permanent brain damage and death, with some people reporting autism-like symptoms due to the long-term effects of brain swelling.
While it may be extremely rare, occasionally families will discover that their child has had an extreme, adverse reaction to a standard vaccination. Knowing the more common forms of vaccine injury can help you seek justice if an immunization negatively affects your family.