Getting vaccinated doesn’t just impact your health — it can also affect the health of your entire community.
The current measles outbreak in the United States is the result of unusually high numbers of unvaccinated people in certain communities.
CDC / Via cdc.gov
Many of those communities have low vaccination rates because parents are choosing not to vaccinate their kids. "We almost eliminated measles in the United States, but because of the clustering communities refusing the measles vaccine, we're seeing more outbreaks of it," Dr. Jon Abramson, professor of pediatrics at Wake Forest University, tells BuzzFeed Life. As of January 30, over 102 cases were confirmed across 14 states.
Herd immunity is when enough people in a community are vaccinated against a disease so that if someone gets infected, the disease won't be able to spread from person to person — it gets contained. This creates a protective effect for the entire community, and not just those who are inoculated, pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Kate O'Brien, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells BuzzFeed Life.
That protective effect is important because some people can't be vaccinated, for medical reasons, O'Brien says. People with a compromised immune system from a genetic immunodeficiency or from receiving chemotherapy for cancer, for instance. And also very young kids — babies often can't be vaccinated for certain diseases (including measles) before a certain age. Herd immunity protects these people.
Here is a GIF that shows how herd immunity works:
Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed
