Immunisation

For certain infectious diseases like measles or mumps, once a person has had them and recovered, they are almost certain never to catch that disease again.

This is because when you get an infectious disease your body makes antibodies against that disease, which means that if you are ever exposed to it again, the antibodies in your blood will kill off the 'bugs' before they have any effect.   

In the UK, babies and young children are routinely immunised against several different infectious diseases.

Immunisation of children in the UK is not compulsory as it is in some other countries, so parents choose whether or not to have their child immunised.  However, there are very good reasons why we immunise children (see 'Why do we immunise?').   

Designing a vaccine and vaccine safety in clinical trials

Safety is always the primary concern in designing a vaccine and is the first thing that is tested when a new vaccine is going through clinical trials. All potential problems of any kind are thoroughly investigated and excluded before clinical trials for the vaccine are started with children.

The standards and regulations for testing and monitoring vaccines are very high, and they must pass through various stages and phases of rigorous trials, testing, and research before they are approved for use. It often takes many years for a vaccine to make it through testing and be approved, and it is still closely monitored after it has been approved. 

In the final phase of testing, and after they have been approved for safe use, data is collected from a wide range of people using it to check on and monitor any rare side effects. These effects are often studied by researchers by having parents keep diaries of their children's symptoms after vaccination, if there are any.  

By the time that a vaccine is ready to be given routinely to all children, there will be evidence of the vaccine’s safety from studies involving tens of thousands of children, and this evidence will have been examined extremely carefully by national and international drug safety committees. 

The immunisation programme in the United Kingdom aims to give children the best possible protection against the widest range of infectious diseases in the safest way possible.

The schedule that the immunisation programme recommends for children for routine vaccination is as follows: 

For more information about routine vaccination/immunisation recommendations, including information about selective immunisation programmes and additional vaccines for individuals with underlying medical conditions, see the information published by the UK Health Security Agency at GOV.UK (see ‘Resources and Information’).