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A vaccination's immediate benefit is individual immunity. Vaccines provide long-term or lifelong protection against disease. Vaccines recommended in early childhood protect children from measles, chickenpox, and other illnesses. As children grow older, additional vaccines protect them from diseases that affect adolescents and adults and conditions they may encounter during travel to other regions. For example, travelers to certain parts of Africa must receive the yellow fever vaccine, as the disease is still prevalent there.

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It's much easier and more cost-effective to prevent a disease than to treat it, and prevention is what immunizations aim to do. Immunizations protect us from serious diseases and prevent the spread of those diseases to others. Throughout the years, immunizations have stopped epidemics of once-common infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, and whooping cough and seen the near eradication of others, such as polio and smallpox.

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