I get that no immunization is 100% but what is the real chance of people getting sick after immunized? We should look into that first before getting all hysterical.
I’m jumping on board her to say that I agree with earlier posts: Not vaccinating your child is child abuse. It’s like saying that you don’t believe in putting a seatbelt on your kid in a car because you heard once that it’s safer if people are thrown free.
Please look at the medical evidence.
For herd immunity to work, 95%-plus people need to be vaccinated. In some states, like Maine, the opt-outers have driven immunity down to 80% in some areas and some children’s lives have been ruined as a result. Some people die. Some are permanently disabled by diseases that they could have avoided.
Just a few highlights of what vaccinations protect us from:
- A healthy teen lost his life withing 48 hours because of miningococcemia
- each year hundreds of children die from the flu.The CDC does not keep track of adult flu deaths.
- Children who get chicken pox–a disease that many think is harmless–can come down with pneumonia and joint infections
- Whooping cough is on the rise–the number of cases (30K+) rose 15% last year alone; the cluster of cases are in states with high vaccination opt-out rates; babies especially can die from this, from the violence of the coughing that can last 10 weeks.
- Tetanus: caused by a cut; symptoms include muscle spasms so severe they can break the bones; 10% of those infected die. And paraphrasing the CDC pdf–the deaths from tetanus in the US are universally from those who haven’t vaccinated their children and/or allowed the vaccine to wear off (after 10 years).
I could go on and on . . .
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-wisconsin-madison/1892837-soar-for-parents.html
OP has asked if parents should bother going along to summer orientation and registration at UW-Madison.
Do we all have a minimal chance of meeting you, @Iglooo? You said that you don’t get flu shots, so you’re a threat to our health during flu season.
I don’t usually eat a lot of food with dyes so apparently I was sensitive to the blue cupcake and blue punch, but in any case If I drank a vat of blue dye it wouldn’t affect your chances of becoming ill. If vaccination were simply a matter of protecting the person receiving the vaccine I’d be much more likely to give parents who choose to forego inoculations for their children a pass. Unfortunately it’s not. The unvaccinated pose a public health risk to the many categories of people susceptible to dangerous childhood diseases.
I didn’t read through the entire thread, so forgive me if this was posted previously. Here is some food for thought, by author Roald Dahl, who lost a child to measles, and wrote this essay many years after his daughter had died.
http://www.roalddahl.com/roald-dahl/timeline/1960s/november-1962
That’s another thing we should look into; what is the chance an unsyptomactic person infecting others. Is it as great as a full-blown sick person can? When we were talking about ebola last year, I remember people claiming ebola in its dormancy is not as infectious or that it’s almost uninfectious that people should calm down. maybe the same applies here? This rigid attitude, crusade until the last person on earth gets on board, is more troubling than the disease itself to me.
My daughter, who had received the vaccine plus had had the booster 6 months earlier, still came down with whooping cough (pertussis) during an outbreak at her boarding school. My husband was days from home and I was at the tail end of chemo so although the school couldn’t keep her because of state health regulations they wouldn’t release her to me until I had the agreement of my oncologist. We had to agree to drive the hour home with both of us masked and gloved and all the windows of the car open, in February, in Massachusetts. I couldn’t even go into her room while she was home. She was very sick and the cough lingered for months, interfering with her ability to sleep and work. Not fun at all.
This is where we could use some stats and let cool heads prevail. How much risk should we tolerate as a society since 100% is simply not possible? How many people have compromised immune system? What are the chances those people meeting antivaxxers? Or that how infectious antivaxxers are when they don’t show any symptoms?, etc.
Of all the diseases for which universal vaccination is recommended, there’s only one that doesn’t spread from one person to another. That disease is tetanus. If you don’t want to get yourself vaccinated against tetanus, that’s fine with me.
@Igloo, here’s a chart of the incubation periods for various diseases and their contagion periods.
http://www.stlouischildrens.org/articles/kidcare/infection-exposure-questions
Please note that some of the more dangerous diseases, such as meningitis, mumps, measles and rubella are all contagious for days before symptoms develop.
Incubation period is not the same as 100% infectious. That’s what I learned during Ebola debate. I was told by learned community I don’t need to worry about ebola unless they already show symptoms. It probably depends on the disease but in all cases I would speculate they are not as infectious during incubation period as when full blown. If uncertain, we need to do more study on that before screaming at every possible carrier.
just looked up my daughters’ college states in the link posted in #132 - very surprised to see that PA doesn’t require anything for college students EXCEPT that a student can’t live in a dorm without having the meningitis vaccine. MMR, etc not required at all, though it does say to check individual college requirements. Very surprised and not pleased…
@Igloo, please read the chart in the link I posted. Incubation times and contagion periods are different, and they vary by disease. For instance, mono has an incubation period of 30-50 days but isn’t contagious until a fever develops. Measles, on the other hand, has an incubation period of 8-12 days but is infectious from 4 days before the rash appears to 4 days after it’s gone. That’s how you end up with contagious kids at Disney. They don’t look or feel sick but they can still spread the disease. Fifth Disease has an incubation period of 4-14 days and is contagious for 7 days before the telltale rash appears, at which point it stops being contagious. IOW, your theory that all diseases are most transmissible during the height of symptoms is just plain wrong.
For me to be a threat to your health, all of the following will have to happen. 1. I meet you and interact closely. 2. I carry the flu virus. 3. The virus be very infectious when I don’t have any symptoms. What is the chance I carry flu virus when I haven’t gotten a flu ever in my life? 10%? What is the infection rate of an unsymptomatic carrier? Less than 10%? What is the chance I meet you anyway? Maybe 0.1%? What are the chances all three happen? Almost none.
@Iglooo No, it absolutely depends on the disease. Blood-bourne pathogens (such as Ebola, HIV, Hep B) are far more difficult to contract compared to other diseases, especially air bourne ones (such as measles, influenza, TB). Comparing the precautions for the two isn’t relevant.
This thread is a perfect example of the failures of science education in this country. It’s sad that some people can’t understand basic medical reports/charts and disease life cycles.
You are missing the point, Iglooo. Healthy people who don’t get vaccinated are free riders. Public health iniatives like this depend on people NOT being free riders. Herd immunity works only if 95+% are vaccinated, which means that the system cannot tolerate a large proportion of free riders.
Sue, I guess I wasn’t clear in what I was asking. I am guessing the rate of being contagious is dependent on where the disease progressed to. At full blown, I would guess it produces more virus and therefore more contagious while before symptoms virus production is muted, relatively speaking. That’s why you are not sick yet and therefore the rate of infection would be lower. In other words, if a disease is infectious at rate 30% when sick, it would be less contagious when not sick, at a lower rate anywhere between 0-30%. And that applies more generally however disease is commicated, by blood or airborne, I would think.
I am not missing the point. I am just saying it’s ok that some people are free riders. In everything, there are free riders. We have to do risk assesment before getting hysterical.