(no subject)

[rivka]

Michael tells me to let this stuff go, but I can't.

So there's this woman on mothering.com - and right away you know that this isn't going anywhere good - whose daughter has been exposed to chicken pox. The kid has developed two pox so far but no fever. And the mom wants to know: "I can take her trick-or-treating, right?"

Mercifully for my sanity, most people on the thread are saying NO, keep her home. But there's a small, vocal contingent saying things like, "Yeah, I wish you could trick-or-treat at our house, because I'd love to expose my kids!" and "Sure, just don't let her put her hand in the treat bowl" (um, chicken pox is airborne), and "Gosh, contagious people go in public out all the time before they know they've been exposed. So what's the difference?"

Someone I don't know put it perfectly:

Back in the days before vaccines, you know what people did with kids who had "childhood illnesses?"

They kept them home, in bed, for the entire course of the illness. Because that was what you did.

When all those diseases were in circulation, people KNEW they could be serious. They didn't mess around, they didn't send them to school, they didn't take them grocery shopping, they didn't take them to Halloween parties, and they didn't take them door to door around the entire neighborhood.

They just didn't. Sick children were kept at home. In fact, in many municipalities, sick children were officially put under quarantine by local public health officials. My grandfather was a public health agent in the days before (most) vaccines and before antibiotics. One of his jobs was to go to the houses of people with certain illnesses and post the big, official, QUARANTINE signs on their doors.

If you're not going to vaccinate, if that is the world you want, then you need to LIVE IN THAT WORLD. That world where those diseases are recognized as commonplace BUT potentially serious to certain people, and where sick children are kept home and treated as sick, to help their bodies recover.

Yes. That one line encapsulates it all: "If you're not going to vaccinate, if that is the world you want, then you need to LIVE IN THAT WORLD." Not a made-up world in which there are no inconvenient consequences to not vaccinating your kids, and everyone is delighted to see your little disease vectors because they all think of chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough as negligible trifles.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Oh, that is BEAUTIFULLY put.

Rivka, do you know about the board Trolls With Wooden Spoons? If you're going to read at MDC you ought to at least be able to rinse with TWWS afterward....

It's at http://www.trollswithwoodenspoons.com/index.php and you have to register to read anything. It was spun off by MDCers who couldn't take the slavish devotion to pseudoscience any longer, and exists mostly to mock. (Here's THEIR thread talking about the idiot who wants to take her kid ToT'ing with CP: http://www.trollswithwoodenspoons.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21450 )

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Oh, bless you! That's just what I needed.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

[melebeth]

Hallelujah. (For that one line of perfect sense in the response.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

What a beautifully succinct statement.

[redbird]

At least some Christian Scientists deal with diseases like measles by quarantining the patients; they aren't saying "it's trivial," much less "getting sick is good for you" (which seems to be the idea behind wanting their children to get the chicken pox virus, but not in a vaccine). And those are people who explicitly believe that prayer can cure disease.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think it's the "Law of Conservation of Stupid." Sort of like thermodynamics.

"Stupid is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes form."

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I am stealing this, printing it in 20 pt. type, and sticking it on the wall above my computer. It will remind me that really are times when it's a good idea to put the computer down and walk away.

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

That really is probably the best response I could imagine. Hopefully it doesn't sail over the OP's head.

Also:
"...because they all think of chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough as negligible trifles."

Forgetting, of course, how many people died of these negligible trifles, despite quarantine. And the number that could have died if not for quarantine is just unimaginable.

These diseases still exist and are still serious despite the frequency of mild cases. And the nild cases _are_ frequent, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics and antivirals.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Oh no. They don't forget the people who died of those illnesses. They deny their existence altogether.

People don't die of measles or chicken pox, or whooping cough - unless they've got some other thing wrong with them that would have killed them anyway. Anyone with a perfect immune system (which is to say, anyone whose mother has birthed naturally, breastfed, attachment parented, and intervened to assure that they don't get stuck with needles in the ped's office) could kick those diseases in a week or two, tops.

They have their heads that far up their butts.

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

Their line of thinking makes my brain hurt.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Didja catch the thread about "my three-year-old has cystic fibrosis and I want to take her to India. Should she be vaccinated?"

Again, most people were sane enough to say yes. But someone said "at some point we just have to trust that breastfeeding gave our kids good immune systems." I so wanted to follow up with "that's why there were never any epidemics until the invention of formula."

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

She asks these questions, yet people with compromised immune systems, such as her daughter, are ushered to the front of the line for vaccines. I don't know how you maintain your sanity while reading things like this. I'd be apt to yell at the computer and pound on my desk. Such pure stupidity frustrates me - although perhaps if we could bottle a true sample it could be analyzed and a vaccine developed... oh never mind. :)

[naomikritzer]

OH GOD ALMIGHTY that thread made me want to find that mother and beat her senseless.

If you want to gamble on the protections of herd immunity while living in the U.S., that is (infuriatingly) your choice as a parent, although playing those odds with a child who has a potentially fatal disease like CF is grossly irresponsible. TAKING SUCH A CHILD TO INDIA UNVACCINATED is so far beyond the pale I don't even know how to talk to someone like this.

In fact, even though my experiences of international travel and living were possibly the most valuable learning experience of my life, I do not think I would take a child with CF to India at all. Air pollution there is atrocious, and the key to a relatively long life for a person with CF is to absolutely minimize the incremental damage that gets done. (I read a really fascinating article a year or two back comparing approaches and outcomes to the top clinic in the U.S. for CF -- which is in my city -- and a somewhat below-average clinic, this one in Ohio. In theory, they did basically the same stuff. The Minneapolis ped wasn't doing anything cutting edge, he was just being an absolute hardass. If someone started cutting corners with their treatment, and their health started to slip even slightly, he'd put them in the hospital for a few weeks to try to regain the lost ground. It kind of drove the teenagers in the program nuts, but his patients were more likely to live well into adulthood than anyone else's anywhere.) (And I can't even begin to imagine his response to a parent who refused to have their child with CF vaccinated against measles or the flu, or who wanted to them to India.)

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Yup, I caught that thread.

Head. Explode.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

I can't stand anti-vaxers. Can't stand 'em.

N.

[eeyorerin]

That is beautifully put.

My dad's mother was a mostly soft-spoken and reticent woman, but I can still remember her talking about what it was like to leave my father, who was three years old, at the quarantine ward at the hospital when he developed polio (he needed more care than could be provided at home and there was the risk of exposure of the rest of the household). She was so glad that he would hopefully never have to do that with his children.

Me, I'm still amazed that there's chicken pox vaccine now, as I remember my very dull week of quarantine when I came down with it over a winter vacation all too well.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

People die of chicken pox. Still.

I got chicken pox as an adult -- even though I'd had it as a child -- and it was serious.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I'm constantly amazed at people who would rather expose their children to a wild virus than a dead or attenuated pure strain in a tested medicinal treatment. Amazed.

[txobserver.livejournal.com]

I'm old enough to have had measles, mumps and rubella as a child, and to have experienced the excitement of my parents when the Salk vaccine for polio was announced. It is totally bonkers for people to be blase about diseases that are horrible to experience even when you don't end up with one of the more dire outcomes. I was extremely sick for weeks when I had measles and mumps was enormously painful. Most adults remember having chickenpox, which presents in a variety of ways, but plenty of people don't escape with a mild case. That mother is a lunatic.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I can remember the days when, if you had an infectious disease in the house, you had to return library books to the Public Health Department to be disinfected, not take them back to the Library, and the form in the front for date-stamping had this requirement included in serious heavy print.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I exposed my mother to rubella when she was pregnant with my little brother. He died twelve hours after he was born.

My sister-in-law, a now-retired school teacher, developed pertussis after being exposed by one of her students who had not been vaccinated. It took her nearly two months to recover.

I remember my parents and my grandmother and my aunts and uncles telling me stories about polio, and summers spent in fear.

Being the daughter of a biochemist, I often find myself sitting on my hands after reading the latest stupid, idiotic, outrageous pseudo-science blatherings from a misinformed, miseducated, misguided moron. They've all perfected the art of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing, "lalala I can't hear you!" It makes me so very, very angry.

*checking out Trolls With Wooden Spoons*

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

This is why I can't read stuff like mothering.com - all my exploded brains all over everything would be *so messy* to clean up!

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Why would you want to let this stuff go? They are advocating actions that kill people, and you know it, and on some level, so do they.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

You have to let this one go, because there's nothing else you can do. If you go to MDC and post a comment indicating that, hey, this course of action can kill people, the moderators will yank the thread for user agreement violations. Perhaps you are being unsupportive, or sarcastic in tone, or perhaps your vocabulary doesn't pass muster as sufficiently respectful. Whatever it is, the post will come down. Do it enough and they'll ban you.

MDC is one hell of a repository for advice on how to be dangerously irresponsible while parenting. There's the consensual parenting approach to carseats (drive slowly on backroads, but don't force Precious to sit down and strap in). There's AIDS denialism (according to them, breast milk doesn't carry the virus to exclusively breast fed babies). There's homebirthing tripe of every flavor and consistency (intrapartum fetal death is apparantly preferable to birthing in hospital). There's homeopathic remedies for everything from anxiety to cancer. Some parts of the board are great resources (the pregnancy loss section is awesome). Others vibrate between insane and inane.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

...the only reason why I am not screaming and tearing at my hair right now is because it would be damn hard to explain to my labmates why I abruptly went insane. Did you have to drop the whole list down all at once like that?

(Note: Not actually criticizing you as such, naturally.)

[naomikritzer]

Yeah. People on that board have died due to their own obstinate devotion to quackery. They have lost babies. The radical change they made in response to the mounting number of dead and seriously disabled babies born to mothers engaging in unassisted homebirth (which is exactly what it sounds like -- homebirth with no midwife or other trained attendant!) was to say that from now on, they would not be hosting discussions where women asked for advice while in labor. (Women were, I kid you not, posting things like, "my water broke almost two weeks ago and I'm STILL not having regular contractions; if I go to a hospital they'll give me interventions, what should I dooooooooooo?" I am not making this up.)

[naomikritzer]

Oh, and to clarify, I'm talking about people who PLAN to have no attendant, not people who have really fast labors. Lots of people have unplanned unassisted home (or car) births; it happens and things are usually fine.

PLANNING to do it that way = totally irresponsible.

[ailbhe]

I cannot read that stuff.

I know several people who had to delay or avoid certain vaccinations - and chickenpox vaccinations aren't readily available here or in Ireland, which is why my family spent last Christmas in almost total isolation even though we had no symptoms, in case we were infectious and might expose the pregnant woman, the elderly man living with his very very elderly mother-in-law, the young nun (70) who cares for the older nuns, the immunocopromised cousin... We went home to Ireland for Christmas at considerable cost and we didn't get to see anyone except my own mother. I considered that *minimum* responsibility, and I did a lot of reading around infectious times, too, before boarding the plane, because people travel on planes even if they aren't me. *And none of us got it at all*.

I've had it three times, though, so perhaps that's my limit.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

My mother always said that my brother had all the childhood illnesses and I didn't. At a point in my being sick where it was important to know if I'd had them or not, we did blood tests and I had antibodies to all of them. I'd had the illnesses, but not enough to show. So I probably gave them to lots of other kids.

[naomikritzer]

Incidentally, I write short articles for an online service. They're going to run a bunch of articles on the flu, and one of my assignments is a "vaccine panic" article, since so many people are worrying about it. Let me tell you, it is DAMN HARD to debunk some of the stuff floating around (briefly! concisely! because people read these articles on their Blackberries, not their computer screens!) without suggesting "here, panic about THIS!" to all the people who might not have heard that particular rumor.

I started to address the story about the Canadians and their seasonal flu shot issues (a Mexican study found that people who had the seasonal flu shot were less likely to develop serious complications) but (a) I'm not sure it was exactly DEBUNKED so much as outfitted with mitigating details that are complicated to explain and (b) I don't know if this story has much traction yet. Besides, from what I understand, you aren't supposed to get the shots too close together, so lots of people are holding off in the hopes of getting the H1N1 vaccine first. (And I won't argue that seems more urgent, since the seasonal flu isn't even circulating much yet.)

I did tell people there's less mercury in an adult flu shot than in a 6-ounce can of tuna. DO YOU FEED YOUR CHILDREN TUNA CASSEROLE, PEOPLE? THEN SHUT UP ABOUT THOSE SCARY VACCINES WITH THEIR EVIL EVIL MERCURY. (I researched this last year, but comparing the flu shot to the mercury in a typical sushi dinner. Wow, was that ever a sobering set of numbers. I still feed my children sushi, but now I feel guilty about it.)

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

Of course, the hardcore anti-vaxxers will argue that eating mercury is DIFFERENT than injecting it into the bloodstream, omg!

Or maybe they're just all vegans?

Still haven't gotten off my arse to ask my son's ped about the H1N1 jab - not sure how much of a point there is, given his tiny in-home daycare, although I probably should call his ped tomorrow.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I researched this last year, but comparing the flu shot to the mercury in a typical sushi dinner. Wow, was that ever a sobering set of numbers. I still feed my children sushi, but now I feel guilty about it.

I feed my kid sushi too, and Coz had a sushi-enriched uterine environment and now gets sushi-enriched breastmilk. I have always thought that we were relatively mercury-safe if we eliminated tuna, hamachi, and mackerel. Were you able to get a sense of whether that's the case?

Living in that world

[(Anonymous)]

My little sister got measles in about 1970. There was no vaccine in those days and my uncle was professor of paediatrics at a large Sydney university. He made all of us get gammaglobulin shots to bost immunity, and he made my mother keep my sister in a darkened room, with no noise, in bed, for two weeks. He'd seen the kids blinded, deafened, crippled, given epilepsy by complications of measles. He took no chances whatsoever, and as soon as there was a safe vaccine he made us all have it. I remember being really cross about having to have needles that other kids got out of. Now I understand.
I should add, from personal experience, that the pertussis vaccine wears off, and your kids need boosters at about 10 or 11. Many doctors do not recognise pertussis, because they've never seen it. As a result my vaccinated sons caught it at 11 and passed it on to my cousin's 4 month old baby. I have never felt so guilty in my life. The baby was fine, in the end, but he spent two weeks in hospital.
You are fighting the good fight, Rivka, and if even one gullible reader sees what you write, and changes her mind that's a victory.
But oh, the ignorant and stupid burns, doesn't it?
Emma

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Vaccination is one fight I just can't walk away from. I don't understand the other point of view, and I don't know how to talk to people who won't accept the scientific method as a valid way of figuring stuff out.

My sister and I lived in Africa as children and saw children -- the lucky ones who survived -- permanently twisted by polio. Vaccines are one of the best things the 20th century had to offer. How can you take health and life and claim that somehow they're bad?

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I used to work in African blindness prevention programs. Measles is the leading cause of preventable blindness in Africa. And yes you see scores of beggers with twisted limbs who were polio victims. It is very real.

Both my aunt and sister in law got whooping cough as babies - my aunt suffered a stroke as a result which paralyzed the right side of her body. My sister in law nearly died (turning blue, not able to breath) but they got her to the hospital before permanent damage was done.

What gets me the most about the anti-vax stuff is that the people most vocal are all so privileged and they don't know it or won't acknowledge it. Heck, there is a little boy in Ant's class who has Leukemia. His mom has kept him home a lot this year, not because HE is sick, but because everyone else is. This little boy's education is directly impacted by other people's health decisions. The kid is already going through hell; why make it more intense?

[ailbhe]

I had measles and whooping cough and chicken pox as a toddler, and I'm fine. My children are still vaccinated because even if they would be fine, like I was, there are other people whom they might infect who might die until they were dead in the way of dead people who don't stop being dead. Ever.

This is such a no-brainer for me.

[(Anonymous)]

You are right of course, Ailbhe. Most kids would be fine, especially as in countries like yours and mine, they are likely to be well nourished and warm and getting enough sleep. Because we are so safe we forget that when everyone got measles, even a small number of complications left a lot of very damaged people. We don't see those now, BECAUSE of vaccination, so ignorant people think these are minor diseases.

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

I entirely agree. For myself, I'd rather have my child alive with autism, than my child dead from pertussis or Hib meningitis.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

The thing that got me, once I did the math on it, is that even if you assume all the anti-vax foam-at-the-mouth 'statistics' are valid, and take the overall prevalence of autism 'caused by' vaccines, in their view ...

it's still less common than intersex conditions. Which are never, ever mentioned in any parenting book I've come across; I only knew about them and prepared myself ahead of time for the possibility because I'M QUEER and knew intersex people through being in GLBTQIA organizations.

I'm not saying intersex is COMMON; I'm saying it's distinctly more common, statistically, than the anti-vaxers claim vaccine-caused autism is.

We're worrying about the wrong things, societally ...

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

"
We're worrying about the wrong things, societally ..."

You've just hit the nail on the head. As a society, we are more frightened of uncommon things than common things, and thusly take ridiculous precautions against them. More people die from heart disease than from ebola, but people don't do the things to keep themselves healthier. More people die in car accidents than airplane crashes, but people don't drive safer. I've rapidly come around to the conclusion that humanity is crazy.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I subscribe to an idea first articulated on the 'Free-Range Kids' blog's comments section that if a risk is, statistically, less common than the likelihood of me (a) getting into a car accident (b) with the kid in the car (c) before the kid is in high school, I label it a 'negligible risk' and refuse to rejigger my whoooooole life to avoid it. Vax-caused autism is one such. So are a lot of other things I see obsessed about on momsites.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

My mom is not anti-vax, but did go out of her way to expose me to kids from my preschool who were being kept home with a range of standard childhood illnesses; she believes that actual live exposure gives better lifelong protection than just vaccination.

She also wanted to make sure that I got all the stuff you couldn't vaccinate against back then (like chicken pox) when I was too small to actively oppose my own treatment. I do faintly remember having chicken pox and being miserable (they zipped me into my footy sleepers and pinned the zipper shut so I couldn't scratch them open, plus of course ointments and stuff); I'm told I was barely three.