Injured persons are an integral part of every Out Patient Department (OPD) in a hospital. At our hospital we get around 5 to 10 injury cases every day. And there is only one thing common in all these cases… all of them want Injection TT (Tetanus Toxoid). If it is a child who gets injured, the parents drag them to the hospital just to prick them with the syringe loaded with the magical ‘TT’. I am talking about the people in my area who resist the idea of immunization of small kids. They blatantly refuse to give the small babies injections, but they want everybody to get the ‘TT’ which they consider as a medicine for wound healing, and not as a vaccine. According to these demanding patients, one dose of TT is effective only for 6 months. I have no idea where they get such ideas from and so in this post I will be dealing with the Prevention of Tetanus and some of the important misconceptions regarding the Tetanus Immunization.
Before you go into the details of Tetanus, you might want to take a look at the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP).
