(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

[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.