I’m anti-vaccination with a child. Hate is a strong word Abby. However, I do feel you need to be a little more diplomatic. There is 100% a personal choice, hence the lack of laws requiring you to vaccinate. It is unfair to state that anyone has been poorly informed. Information only reacts with an individuals opinion and situation, the main word being individual. What is right for you, may not be right for me…and that’s ok. You shouldn’t quote the word ‘informed’ as if it is a comical word to use. It is the most important. The parents with autistic children for example who fully believe this was caused post-vaccine, in my opinion are not terrible terrible informants.

Just for the record.. 5 years late on the reply but.. I would never use a vaccine (with it’s unknown, under-studied side effects) to prevent the possibility of a plane crash. All of a sudden, you gain 10 more potential risks. If your time’s up, you’re time’s up. You can’t answer that question for everyone I’m afraid. It’s not as obvious as you think! Thoughts?

If anyone ever gets a varicella vaccine that is not strong enough and their parents or the doctor don’t catch it, and it wears off when they’re twenty-five, they better pray for herd immunity because otherwise they are in very big trouble.

And it doesn’t end there. Because we no longer have periodic exposure to the varicella virus, adults are now at greater risk of shingles on into old age. That is a tough disease to deal with even if it doesn’t kill you (and it usually doesn’t).

But generally I am for the right of patients to consent to their care and, I know you don’t want to hear this, but parents are the stand-in for their children as far as medical consent is concerned. Sorry you don’t like the decisions that other people make for themselves, but if we’re to have a free society you will just have to learn to deal with it (multiplied, of course, by the number of people who are handwringing about this, not like you can take away everyone’s freedom all by yourself).

Also, I’d just like to point out that vaccinated kids still catch diseases they are vaccinated against, and that diseases can change over time and the vaccine makers don’t always catch up. For instance, we had a pertussis outbreak here locally. That’s a bacterial infection. Apparently the bacterium has changed and nobody had bothered updating the vaccine yet.

Then there’s the possibility of multiple vaccines in one shot being overwhelming to some children’s immune systems. Honestly, who catches diptheria and pertussis and tetanus ALL AT ONCE?

And finally, it was known in the early 1900s that people who ate good, nourishing diets were much less susceptible to tuberculosis than people who ate a lot of junk, which was an issue even at that time. Now think about where all the really nasty scary diseases are happening. Most of the people in those regions ARE POOR AND STARVING. Of course they’re going to be vulnerable to the first nasty germ that comes along. Not that Americans going overseas are necessarily going to be much better off at this point, since we’re going around eating out of boxes and cans or boasting about going vegan (sorry, that’s not the best nutrition for people either). But we’ve got access to multivitamins that the poor in other countries don’t have. So we have a little bit of an edge, and we still have better nutrition here than people do who hardly get any *food* in, say, India–so I’d be surprised to see unvaxed American travelers get sick at as high a rate as the locals do elsewhere.

I mean, there’s lots of room for argument and different opinions here. And yeah, again, I vaccinated my child. But you better bet I would have been on that federal hotline and on the phone to a lawyer if anything major had happened to her after any of her shots!

That’s an interesting link, thanks. On MMR and autism in general, go here for links to the Danish study &c, plus comprehensive debunking of Andrew Wakefield: http://www.vaccinesafety.edu/cc-mmr.htm. The Danish study’s the kicker, here (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134#t=articleResults). It shows a slightly higher (not statistically significant) percentage of autism spectrum disorders in non-vaccinated children.

These parents too will have been grieving for the change in their children — because the appearance of the milder autism spectrum disorders is something that seems to come out of the blue (baby seems to be developing fine, toddler seems… well, different, changed, not the person that they were) but not attributing it to vaccination. Anecdotal evidence can be important. But it can’t outweigh big numbers (plus the endless smaller studies that have shown the same thing).

As to the http://www.childhealthsafety.wordpress.com guy: I find the alternation between logarithmic scale and analog scale in his graphs INCREDIBLY dishonest. He picks and chooses not only his data but his timelines on the basis of what trends he wishes to extrapolate. When one doesn’t work he switches to the other mode. He does this both on smallpox — using the logarithmic to generate a trend of decline when he wants to prove that vaccination had no impact (and starting his trend AFTER the introduction of vaccination), and the analog when he wants to prove that STOPPING vaccination had an impact (pulling into a shorter scale for maximum value) — and on measles — when the vaccination impact bucks the logarithmic trend he’s lovingly created (even when he’s chosen the point at which he starts his curve), he switches to the analogue. He also decides that over-diagnosing of measles is a new phenomenon — i.e., that the figures which do not suit his case are junk, and that the previous figures, which he likes, were fine.

His scurvy stuff is nonsense. It was naval doctors who developed the Vitamin C treatment. It’s medical awareness of the causes of the disease and effective treatment that reduced mortality — that and decline in long naval tours of duty (I would guess, judging by the wartime spikes). It’s nothing so woolly as better nutrition. The lime juice law was a government public health programme, specific to sailors. It’s medical intervention.

Rubella vaccination has always been about the protection of unborn children. Why don’t we vaccinate against other birth defect-causing ailments? Because we, umm, can’t.

You’ll notice he doesn’t have a trend line on his diphtheria graph? Why? Because any trend line you could draw on that data would not produce the eradication of diphtheria deaths that proceeds from the vaccination campaign which began in 1940 (UK).

Tetanus? He ignores the introduction of post-exposure inoculation. I wasn’t vaccinated for tetanus as a child. But when i cut myself badly enough to need stitches, I got a shot, as my parents did too. I would bet my bottom dollar that this pre-vax treatment contributed to the reduction of death rates.

Further, he deals in mortality rates (lower, because of better medical care — and nutrition and living standards too) rather than cases contracted: the after-effects of polio are hideous, and measles can cause lasting damage.

And, umm, he fails to mention anywhere that Wakefield’s Lancet article was pulled, he’s been struck off the GMC and his research found to be “fraudulent”, or what happened to his case against the Sunday Times.

The two peer-reviewed studies he cites don’t dispute that vaccination helped eliminate smallpox. The first also observes that there appears to be a link between introduction of polio vaccination and decline in polio rates. It also admits that there’s a problem assessing medical measures against mortality rather than incidence. But, yes, sanitation and nutrition — also, importantly, medical understanding of transmission methods and effective medical treatment on transmission — have been central to the reduction in incidence and mortality of epidemic-type diseases. I think it’s interesting that they only measure medicine by specific drug treatments and availability rather than (say) hospital accessibility, general trends (hygiene post-Florence Nightingale, understanding of sepsis), and I think that in their missing mortality rate there will be more that is medical than they’re allowing for.

Smallpox may have been on the decline in some countries. It was alive and kicking and killing in Africa: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668906/. As regards efficacy of vaccination as a central part of the campaign of containment and surveillance that led to eradication: page 591 of this lengthy document has some tables as to how it prevented transition http://whqlibdoc.who.int/smallpox/9241561106_chp11.pdf. (There is some ABSOLUTELY excruciating detail on why these vaccines worked better than earlier ones.)

As regards Leicester? That’s a fascinating little book. As regards the data — if it’s accurate, and it appears that both the author and his friends on the parish board would have been highly motivated neither to identify smallpox cases let alone write up deaths to smallpox — the population of Leicester is, and always has been, FAR, FAR smaller than London, Sheffield or Glasgow, so the infection rate per capita looks like it’s significantly higher. His data would suggest, though, that medical care in Leicester was better than that in the British Army in the UK (no big surprises there, given we’re talking only a few years after Florence Nightingale), and lightyears ahead of whatever the Japanese were doing. I’m curious, though, as to where he got his data on Japan. However, as data goes I’m going to take global eradication of smallpox over multiple countries over a 2% better survival rate than the British Army any day of the week.

As regards Elizabeth’s link: the vaccines are back in use. There were concerns. These were investigated. The vaccine has been found safe. That’s what science does. Investigate something. Find it OK or not OK. React accordingly. And what’s irritating about it is that, more than two years after the vaccines came back in use, people are still saying “They don’t use them in Japan, because they kill.”

The 77.3% figure came from her figures about those infected. I’m not sure WHY the scientists specified that the outbreak was among similar communities in Israel and the US, it’s true — my bad.

Anyway, the public health stuff is interesting reading — particularly the one on where the improvements in health actually come from. It’s not a line of argument I like (because it’s the one used by AIDS-denialists in South Africa, that retrovirals don’t work but nutrition does — which is weird, because the people who were dying in the 80s and 90s in the West before retrovirals weren’t malnourished). But it is important and it’s something that (yes) the WHO focuses on too (cf their Breast is Best campaigns): big pharma does tend to medicalise the non-medical.

Wow! Long comment, sorry. I don’t think governments have our best interests at heart (though I don’t think they’re automatically bad, either). What I actually said was that UK and Australian governments have their eye on their cash flow — our NHS is being cut to hell at the moment — and that if they could save money by cutting out vaccines, they would. I’ll stand by that one. (They probably are saving money already by not insisting on whooping cough boosters — it appears the vaccine’s only really effective for seven years…)

And, yes, in the UK too doctors have vaccination targets that assist their funding. I asked my doctor about that on Z’s MMR, and she said, yes, they do. Ditto they have blood pressure reduction targets. Ditto targets in other sectors. But it’s the vaccine ones that draw the attention, for some reason.

SARS and H1N1? Interestingly, crossing most Asian borders you are checked for symptoms, still. It’s an issue of containment, here, I think.

I’m not setting myself up as a medical expert, here. But (perhaps I spend too much time on the internet), the loudest voices online — and particularly folk talking about travel with kids — are anti-vax and often quite staggeringly misinformed. And one of the reasons I wrote this post was because people assume that because we lead an alternative lifestyle and I am (I think) pretty open-minded that I wouldn’t jab or use antimalarials, whereas, in fact, I do both.

Anywise. Have a nice trip. Happy travels. And feel free to pick up whenever.

that’s ok. i caught the second one.