anybody want to debate about choice?
Feb 2, 2015 5:55:00 GMT -5
Post by sisterjanet on Feb 2, 2015 5:55:00 GMT -5
So I forgot if this has been mentioned yet and I'm too lazy to re-read (yes all 27 comments) but if we can have peanut free schools because of nut allergies, why not demand vaccines for all able (health wise) to get them? My kids happen to be allergic to measles, small pox, pertussis, and all these other things we vax for. As are everyone's kid. The scary part is that some of these have a period in which an infected person shows no signs, a period in which they can be silently infecting others. By the time you know a kid in your school has measles it's too late. The whole school is now quarantined.
I was talking about this with my husband, severe allergy situations versus disease outbreak situations. He has more biology knowledge than I do. He mentioned (and some of these points @kitchen already brought up as well) that in the allergy cases, the reaction is severe and very immediate. Peanut free classrooms or schools are because that's how dangerous peanuts can be to some kids. Figuring out how much of a threat exposure to disease entails is much more subtle and depends much more on a whole list of things (specific disease in question, age, general health, existing immunity to the disease or not, proximity to source of disease, potentially more factors as well). In my opinion it's best and safest to get shots if you can, so you don't have to worry about how specific vectors function or whether anybody around you is contagious. That said, while most (possibly all but definitely most) of the diseases we vaccinate against can have serious complications, those complications don't happen every time. Most of the complications from diseases happen a relatively small percent of the time, some a very very small percent of the time depending on the disease and the complication. If you have an allergy, exposure to the allergen is always bad news. A mild allergy means relatively mild bad news (watery eyes, coughing, rashes), but allergies - at least in adults, not sure how they work in kids considering I've heard people mention toddlers growing out of allergies - tend to get more serious the more a person is exposed.
There was a blog post I saw from a father whose child has leukemia that compared unvaccinated children and the threat they pose to his child to peanuts and the threat they pose to children with severe allergies. I get the impression that even the threat of catching a disease when you have a suppressed immune system is less than the threat of those allergies, although from my own gut reaction I imagine it would be so scary to know there are people opting out when your kid is so vulnerable. At the same time, I also get a vague ick feeling at comparing children literally to peanuts and saying 'ban that kid.'
The plan in Georgia that @bunannie mentioned, or the plan @kitchen mentioned of keeping the kids out of class for three weeks if there's a known outbreak and they're not vaccinated, those sound like pretty good policies as far as I can tell. The more I think about things like this, the more I feel like I really need to finish reading my biology textbook so I can try to make my way through an immunology textbook and really understand. Trying to ask about all the things I want to know at a well-child visit usually leaves me feeling like I need to backpedal and reassure the people 'no, seriously, I'm giving my kids all the shots, you see it right there in the record.' Maybe they're just giving me the look because they didn't read a microbiology and immunology textbook either, or because sometimes science can't really give you that kind of answer, at least not without a specific outbreak to be describing.