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Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
New submitter haroldmandel writes in with a story about the increase of certain diseases in school-age children due to parents not having their kids vaccinated. "Parents nervous about the safety of vaccinations for their children may be causing a new problem: the comeback of their grandparents' childhood diseases, reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Despite the successes of childhood immunizations, wrote Penn Nursing researcher Alison M. Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, in the American Journal of Public Health, controversy over their safety has resulted in an increasing number of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated and obtaining legally binding personal belief exemptions against vaccinations for their children."
That is all i have say.
Every reputable medical doctor, along with every pundit even slightly knowledgable about medicine or even basic biology has been warning of this issue ever since the antivaxxer morons got their idiotic campaign going.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I suspect that, rather than "Despite the successes of childhood immunizations", it would be because of those successes that the 'controversy' is presently raging...
Because of the effectiveness of widespread childhood vaccination, we've had at least a generation of people with minimal firsthand exposure to all the wacky pathogenic fun that used to be quite common. Plus, depending on the herd immunity requirements for a given pathogen and vaccine, being part of the first n% of opt-outs is basically cost-free. It isn't until you get closer to herd immunity breakdown that being unvaccinated starts to carry any serious additional risk of infection.
If you have a situation where people's knowledge of the risks is largely historical and the odds are pretty good that you can free-ride your way past them in any case, it (sadly) seems only to be expected that there would be room for assorted controversy to flourish.
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Wow what a slippery slope that is... So for instance should H1N1 vaccinations be required? What about flu shots? If everyone got the flu shot we would likely run out before the high risk people (the young and elderly) had a chance to get it. Not to mention the potential side effects of many vaccines. Personally I and my children are vaccinated for everything I consider a serious disease (polio, etc.), but not H1N1 for instance because the chance of death is practically non-existent. In a free society you have the choice to be stupid... If you take away that choice then its no longer a free society.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
I don't think they need to be mandatory, but I think what *should* happen is we need to publicly shame these parents. Every time a kid dies of Whooping Cough, those parents need to be on the news the same as if they'd drowned their kid in a bathtub.
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
nd what if I don't want to live in society? Fine. But TFA is about parents sending unvaccinated kids to school. They do want the benefits of society, but not any responsibility
Your post could be shortened to "I don't know how vaccination works".
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
That's the only slightly correct sentence in your post. But all the conclusions you draw are wrong.
Immunization via vaccination is based on exactly that fact: Given an healthy immune system, an exposition to the Poliovius will create an immune answer which a) stops the Poliovirus from spreading and b) gives you a lifelong protection. And that's how vaccination works. Your body gets a dose of dead or at least deactivated Poliovirus, your healthy immune system creates the immune answer, and you gain lifelong protection -- and that without the risk of actually catching Poliomyelitis, which an exposition to the real thing would yield.
Did you read TFA? or at least TFS?
These children which aren't getting vaccinated because their parents don't understand science are putting other children at risk.
So it may not be their own children which natural selection sorts out, it may be the children of parents who have accepted that vaccines work, aren't more likely to cause autism, and aren't part of some government conspiracy.
So their "personal belief exemptions" are putting the lives of other people at risk -- basically they've gotten the right to become potential carriers of disease:
You can't just have people opting out of things which is intended to prevent disease in greater society if it puts other people at risk. You're free to choose for yourself, but not when you're talking about communicable disease.
Someone needs to explain to these parents that the rest of the world shouldn't bear the risk of them being stupid. If it was only them and their offspring who might be affected, go ahead. But it isn't.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not a slippery slope. Vaccination recommendations and requirements (yes, you are quite rightly required to be immunized in some places, for some things), are based on a quantitative risk/benefit analysis.
It actually amazes people from outside the US that children unvaccinated for things like whooping cough would be allowed into a public school.
The fact is, there's profit being made here. The next question is what lobbying & what pressure is being put on legislators to insure these profits.
If that is your sole argument, that someone is lobbying the government to force people to get vaccinated so these companies can make money, you've lost any semblance of logical argument.
The fact that you consider homeopathic to be medicine, which it isn't, and choose to focus on the money aspect, which is completely irrelevant to the medically sound reason to be vaccinated, shows your lack of common sense.
I can assure you when people were being vaccinated for smallpox or polio, no one gave a rats ass about who was making a profit, or if a profit was even being made. All they cared about was that the yearly sweeps of infections that plagued the country came to a stop.
Are you now going to complain about all the money those big bad corporations made eradicating smallpox and polio? How about rinderpest, an equally devastating disease which has afflicted animals since before the time of Greeks? Are you going to complain about the money corporations made selling this vaccine to the animal industry to innoculate animals to prevent them from getting infected and making it the second time in human history that a disease has been wiped from the face of the Earth?
It seems counter-intuitive to complain these companies are making money to produce a product which will, eventually, make the use of that product unnecessary (in the case of smallpox and rinderpest). After all, wouldn't it be easier to make something which only treats the symptoms rather than cures it? That way they could have a perpetual source of income.
You and Jenny McCarthy would make a great pair. You should go on tour.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower