When I was about five or six I came down with measles. I can’t remember if it was the first or second time I had it (yes, I am one o’ them okkered buggers to have caught it twice), but I do remember a great deal about it. It was winter, and there was snow on the ground. By the time the daft GP was convinced I was suffering from more than the anxiety of a worried mother, and the ambulance had taken me away, the measles had been joined by pneumonia (a relatively common but serious complication of measles) and they were having quite a party together.
I was taken to an isolation ward. I remember the child in the next glass cubicle constantly trying to escape. I remember being wheeled from one building to another, on a wheelchair, through the snow. I remember being given a boiled egg to eat – but no spoon with which to eat it. I remember a large Afro-Caribbean nurse advancing on me with a syringe that seemed about six feet long and saying “where’s yer bum, then?”
Ah, memories.
Memories that really should have been expunged for today’s children with the advent of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine, but thanks to increased mobility of populations, and not helped by the anti-vaxers, such memories are likely to remain green for some time – at least, that is what one can infer from this communiqué from the World Health Organization.
Mobility is not something one can do much about. However, I am coming round to the view that the anti-vaxers should be held to account for their actions – not for neglecting to have their own children vaccinated, but by exposing the children of others to harm. It should be remembered that measles is not some picturesque rash that can be used as an excuse to stay off school eating ice cream. It can leave infected children – and infected adults – blind, deaf, even dead.
As a Tory I look somewhat askance at legislation that restricts the freedom of others to do what they like, but when that freedom threatens others, action should be taken. And I’m not sure new legislation would be needed, in any case. It might be possible to prosecute parents who willfully refuse to have their children vaccinated on grounds of child cruelty, but that’s not the point – it is not their children, but the children of others who are at risk. In which case, I humbly suggest that such parents be prosecuted for the extant crime of Conspiracy to Endanger Life.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I have this day written to my MP, Stormin‘ Norman Lamb, a senior LibDem and once their spokesman on health. I shall let you know what he says.
Dear Mr Lamb,
I would draw your attention to the following link in which the World Health Organization summarizes recent outbreaks of measles.
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2011_04_21/en/index.html
I am worried that the problem might have been exacerbated by the deliberate, premeditated refusal of some parents to have their children vaccinated on the spurious grounds that such vaccinations are harmful. Instead, such parents expose their own children and those of other parents to what is a very serious disease. It is my view that such parents should be prosecuted for the existing crime of conspiracy to endanger life.
I am a natural conservative and look askance at unnecessary legislation that restricts personal freedom. However, such a philosophy must be tempered with the view that the exercise of such freedoms should not be harmful to others – and the freedom not to vaccinate one’s children does indeed cause harm, or offer the potential to harm, others.
I look forward to your views on this.
Agree with your sentiments, but I’m sure the anti-vaxers would claim that they are only endangering other anti-vaxers’ children – the pro-vaxers’ children having presumably been vaccinated.
They might indeed say that. The counter-argument, though, is that measles doesn’t obligingly wait for people to be vaccinated before striking. The children of pro-vaxers could be infected by older, non-vaccinated children, before the younger children would have been vaccinated.
Indeed, the under-ones (who are the “too young to have been vaccinated yet” group) are at high risk of severe disease if they do contract measles – or a number of other common vaccine-preventable diseases. Hence when we see someone toting a child with obvious any-disease along on the school playground pickup run, where people often have babies in pushchairs, the Boss and I usually think something like:
The other population put at risk by the non-vaccinators are those kids (and adults) who, for some medical reason, CANNOT have a vaccination. Some people with hereditary or acquired immune deficiency problems fall into this group.
I would say the parents of kids in either of these groups would have little sympathy for the anti-vaxxers’ typical windbaggery about “health freedom”. And nor would I.
For some reason I wasn’t ever allowed to be vaccinated against smallpox. Something to do with having had infantile eczema. Thanks to vaccination, and the subsequent extinction of the disease, the problem no longer arises.
One of my former colleagues has a daughter who has leukemia, and has been through multiple rounds of chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant, and as a result can not be vaccinated. Her long-term odds are not at all good, but she (and her parents) wants to live as normal a life as possible. Unfortunately, it looks like she’s going to have to stop going to school, because of the increasing percentage of unvaccinated kids coming into the lower years. It makes me so angry.
Makes me angry, too.
Lock’em up, I say!
I was going to suggest rounding them up and shooting them, and then not broadcasting the videos to the American Public.
A very reasonable proposition, Cromercrox.
We’re currently trying to decide when Junior F can next be
horrifically maimed and unfairly exposed to certain neurological disordervaccinated against some unpleasant affliction, in order to have enough time for his subsequentenforced bout of child abusevaccination, which should be done at 15 months. He has so far attained almost 13.5 months, with a bumful of various jabs and only a short bout of pneumonia to show for it*, in part due to the general good habits of Spaniards when it comes to these things.To the anti-vaxers, I simply say “Piffle, you nincompoops. My actions will not place your child in danger, please offer my child a similar opportunity.”
*Pneumonia is not at present known, nor suspected to be, related to vaccination.
But srsly, folks, one of the problems with the MMR vaccination, or indeed vaccination in general, is its success. On the cognate thread on FB correspondents pointed out that because people don’t get measles (or polio, or diphtheria, or tetanus, or pertussis, or TB) – because we’re all vaccinated against them – people have forgotten how serious these diseases are, and that well within living memory – indeed, in the memory of people younger than I – it was not uncommon for one’s classmates to die from measles, or be deafened or blinded by the associated encephalitis.
I remember, as a boy, a scare about ‘vaccine damage’ supposedly caused by diphtheria vaccine. I still remember TV footage of a child with diphtheria in an isolation ward coughing itself to death; and children with polio spending most of their time in iron lungs. Polio, nowadays, is thankfully rare – and who’s heard of diphtheria nowadays?
The problem, perhaps, is that the government has been too soft in its publicity. As far as I can recall, the publicity about MMR has been some Person in Authority waffling on in a patronizing manner about how safe the vaccine is. Well, the public is notoriously bad at judging such things, and will never be satisfied with a risk unless it is certifiably zero. And, of course, people will often react to Persons in Authority with a certain jaded detachment – such Persons are seen as part of the problem, in league with the evil Pharms and so on.
The government should have resorted to scare tactics. Rather than saying that the vaccine is safe, they should have said that the risks attendant on vaccination are far smaller than those associated with catching the disease – and then parading all-too-human horror stories about how, before the vaccine, children actually died, or were disabled by, measles, and how the disease still wipes out huge numbers of children in places where vaccination doesn’t happen.
this > ” people have forgotten how serious these diseases are, and that well within living memory – indeed, in the memory of people younger than I – it was not uncommon for one’s classmates to die from measles, or be deafened or blinded by the associated encephalitis.”
It’s spot on! People (most of us in the industrial world that is) don’t have a good concept of “children dying from child hood diseases” . Wonder where the name got there?!
I wonder if there will be a huge uproar if lots of children continue dying now and people will blame the government for not enforcing the vaccinations?! I know that here in the US city I reside in you have to prove MMR vaccinations in order to go to uni, as well as public school starting at age 6. Private schools might be excused, I’m not entirely sure…
The nexs in the US are similar: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42913293/ns/health-infectious_diseases/
And if nothing else, CA and whooping cough last year with younger children and deaths is going to be linked too…
Agree that the UK public campaigns have been far too softly-softly. See, for instance, the contrast between the UK “Please vaccinate – please?” posters and the ones from one German state reproduced in this post.
Thanks for that DrAust. As an aside, the posters that made me give up smoking were not the schoolmarmish warnings about how bad smoking is for one’s health, but very graphic posters like this which, incidentally, attracted rather a lot of complaints.
AS for the “my child doesn’t have to be vaccinated since I rely on herd immunity” … I get so angry when people state this when their children CAN be vaccinated. I usually end up explaining that the herd immunity is when everyone who can, gets vaccinated, and then the ones who – like in Cath’s example or CromerCrux himself with smallpox – can benefit from it and be safe since overall it’s still not less than say 80-90% vaccinated.
As for the “older children who are vaccinated protect their younger siblings”. This would be very obvious studying the cases from California last year where the 4 year olds with whooping cough faired pretty ok during thie sickness whereas the younger children (<1 year) unfortenately died… and you can't vaccinate against some of the worst killers for babies, before they are 2 yo since the immune sstem isn't up and running as it will be after that…. we can only rely on having less infected children around and therefore decrease the incidences of disease.
ah well, sorry for preaching since y'all already agree….. it's just so frustrating for me since i end up with these discussions* more often than I would like.
* "measles isn't really a dangerous disease so we don't really need to vaccinate against it. My child will be protected after 'just a little bout' with the sickness….." [yeah, right.]
A classic example of issues pertaining to reliance on “herd immunity” can be seen in the 1990s in Israel when Polio began to rear its ugly face. In “compliant” western countries, the purified protein-based Salk vaccination (considered slightly more effective and safe) is often the vacination of choice. While the Sabin attenuated viral vaccine is still excellent, there is a very tiny risk.
In the 1990s, Israel began to move away from the Sabin, which because it is excreted into the sewer system, etc., tends to immunize those in the herd who didn’t receive the vaccination. As a result, immunodeficient adults and children started to crop up with polio, because there wasn’t enough attenuated virus around for protection–especially with a large ultra-orthodox popoulation, many of whose citizens are ooposed to any vaccinations. Q.E.D.