Vaccines & Your Child

Paul A. Offit, M.D., and Charlotte A. Moser, leading advocates for modern vaccines, answer parents' numerous questions about the underlying science of modern vaccines and the value of childhood immunization, while forthrightly addressing parents' concerns about vaccine safety. In straightforward prose, the authors explain how vaccines work, how they are made, what goes into their making, as well as vaccines' real risks, balanced against the danger of childhood infectious diseases and the threat of diseases that have reemerged due to declining childhood vaccination rates.Offit and Moser address parental fears that children may receive too many vaccines too early. They consider the evidence that the HPV vaccine may cause chronic fatigue or other dangerous side effects, and they lay to rest any worries that additives and preservatives in vaccines cause autism. The authors warn against complacency and a false sense of security or the notion that a disease is too remote to do a child serious harm. There couldn't be a better moment& -or a more pressing need& -for a book that offers honesty, not hype, about protecting children's health.

Paul A. Offit, M.D., F.A.A.P., is the chief of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has authored Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure; Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases; The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis; and Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Charlotte A. Moser is the assistant director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and creator of the center's program for parents, known as Parents PACK. She has developed a variety of educational materials about vaccines, oversees the center's Web content and contact center, and writes the monthly e-mail newsletter for Parents PACK, which has several thousand subscribers.