AIBU to think non vaccination is child abuse

[alittlevoice]

There was this discussion in another thread and i thought i would make a new thread so it doesn't over taken someone elses

To me not vaccinating your child is akin to child abuse because you are putting them at undue risk of disease which is preventable due to scare mongering or from quack doctors that have long been struck off the medical register and shunned from the medical community

I hate the assumption that because there has been no reported cases it means you shouldn't vaccinate your children it's because children have been vaccinated regularly that there has not been a epidemic

leading doctors (not the quacks) have been worried for some time about the rise of mumps because of the scare mongering and children not getting vaccinated and get seriously Ill and have to be saved by modern medicine (which quack parents are always keen to take up on with there anti vaccination stance)

rubella has a incubation period as many other diseases so if your child has it and you dont know and child is near a pregnant woman and she loses her child due to non immunisation I don't understand how as a parent you'd do that to another person

So the long and short of it is why are some parents touched in the head and think they have the right for there child to possibly kill unborn children and infect younger babies too young to have the choice (and for those saying this is far fetched its as plausible of something going wrong from immunisations)

Oops. should have said rotavirus vaccine - wasn't planning on exposing my kids to the actual disease!

My friend has 3 daughters. 2 are completely unvaccinated & 1 is completely vaccinated.

My dds are fully vaccinated.

We didn't know her dd3 had rota virus before she was hospitalised. My dd2 is a few months older than her, and they used to dummy swap (gross, yes & something we discouraged). My dd2 got s very mild case of something that saw her off her food for 24hours. Her dd almost never recovered. She only realised how listless she was as she was due to do kindy pick up, so tried to wake her. Had she not needed to go out....who knows.

We also didn't know that she had whooping cough. Her sister (friends dd2) had it too, and as the dd2 has asthma, they put it down to that. Her dd2 (and her dh) never got an official diagnosis, only her dd3. Because by the time my friend decided to get her kids checked, her dd2 was much better. But her dd3 came back as having WC. So the dr said that is was 'highly likely' that her dh & dd2 had it, because symptoms were identical.

During this time, we spent a lot of time with them. My daughter's didn't catch anything wrt to the whopping cough. Her eldest didn't get anything either.

This is what I find hard to handle re her choices. She exposed babies & children to a virus that could have seriously harmed them. Her daughter's & dh showed symptoms for weeks before she got an official dx for them. But in that time, lots of babies & children were exposed to both the rota virus & whopping cough (her daughter's still went to child care/school).

Well I guess by the US' standards all of us in the UK are neglectful parents because we don't vaccinate our children against those deadly diseases - rotavirus and chickenpox

Or maybe their perception of those illnesses is skewed by the fact that they have a vaccine available and can guilt parents into 'doing the right thing'.

Leoni would love to live the American dream , I know that there is a big formula feeding culture out there. My Auntie is from Maryland, and she has kids and grandkids there. Her stance on breastfeeding is why bf its a lot of hassle, when formula is just as good. I think that there is a big formula culture out there. I remember watching the documentary about the US health system called Sicknote I think or something along that lines, and being appaled by it all, if you cant afford healthcare then you are stuffed. The things people have to do if they cant afford meds, makes me thankful we have the NHS. Is it true that when you are in a US ambulance you have to have your credit card at the ready!

I love the US though, mabey one day we might emigrate to be with my family in Maryland or my dh family in Illinois

I know hrere that if a child catches the pox its no biggie, they are kept at home until they are better.

I know its quite bad over there, its shocking really. My auntie has told me that Obama wants to have socialist health care like we have here but she is against it. She is lucky, her dh has Navy pension, as he was in the Navy, and therefore the US Navy takes care of their health so they get top notch health care free, she is also quite good as she worked for the US government in quite a good job, so gets taken care of. I dont think that they would feel that way if they were in your dads position or like most people there. My auntie has heart problems to but is lucky that everything is paid for her.

Leonie its sad that people have to be cut out of their homes in the US as they are too big to go out the normal way. I watch the documentaries that they have here aobut the half tone man, the 60 year old woman, food comes in big measures in the US. I remember ordering a cesar salad over there, I thought that we would have a little bowl of it with a few leaves and a bit of dressing like they do over here. Out comes this big bucket, a salad complete with hunks of cheese and strips of bacon, i shared it with my dh and even we could not finish it halfway. In Macdonalds, here a large coke would be in a smallish cup, there they have a whole bucket of it, and supersize is supersize, a bucket of fries.

60 stone woman I meant

It is so sad, people have to go without their meds or look to the black market for them, they may then be not to the same standard causing all sorts of problems.

Most people who understand medical research are indeed pro vaccine.

but most people who can also understand that there are a few children who could be in at risk groups who are missed by research; and that choosing to put a child who already has a complex medical history through a vaccination schedule does not equate to being anti jab.

MMR does not equate every jab. Singles should be options.

DS3 and ds4 have a fragile biologial make up; they have high risks of auto immune diseases, compliated medical histories, have to miss entire food groups from their diet due to medically approved reasons.

Would I class their needs the same as ds2 who I would be happy to vaccinate with pretty much anything? No. Would I be happy to pay for separate jabs if they were freely available (thinking mumps here)- yes.

Does that make me anti jab? how could it?

Would I be more likely to consider vaccinating ds4 at say puberty if I felt there weas a safety net if the worst should happen? Quite possibly actually. It's not there though. I already have enough sleepless nights worrying about the disbaled kids I already have; I don;pt do (most) biomed or vegue therapies becuase it emans putting the boys through tings but if I read somewhere that painting myself pink and running naked across the village green would help I may well do it.

OTOH so what if my take is not entirely rational? there are so few in my genetic grouping that we will not affect take up rates and where I am take up is over 90%. Enough shit has happened to us that if am labelled irrational then heck, I earned it.

My kids will not be infecting anyone else who ahs been vaccinated. The vaccinations they HAVE had were private so not recorded anywhere anyway. Should there be a mumps outbreak I would like them to catch it but would then keep them home so nobody else could get it.

We even got yelled at by school for refusal to vaccinate against swine flua s we could not prove they ahd had it; ds3 spent 2 hours a day in an SNU taxi with a child who went on to be hospitalised with it long beore vaccinations were out, he and his siblings hten developed swine flu symptoms and were ill. Enough for me.

Good that you have a lots of beliefs about the health of children in the US vs the UK and the reasons for it - shame that it's not actually based on any scientific evidence. And shame that your family seem to have an equal understanding of scientific evidence and think that chicken pox is a dangerous illness. It's not. But it's avoidable (and does actually carry some small risks - great than vax).

Vaccinated children are not at greater risk of other infections (infections not prevented by the vaccines) than unvaccinated children. On the contrary, in Germany, a study of 496 vaccinated and unvaccinated children found that children who received immunizations against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, Haemophilus influenzae type b and polio within the first three months of life had fewer infections with vaccine-related and unrelated pathogens than the non-vaccinated group.
Bacterial and viral infections, on the other hand, often predispose children and adults to severe, invasive infections with other pathogens. For example, children with pneumococcal pneumonia are more likely to have had a recent influenza infection than other children. Similarly, varicella infection increases susceptibility to the 'flesh-eating bacteria (i.e., group A strep).

Scram - quite right. There is no such thing as a medicine that is suitable for absolutely everyone on the planet. Even aspirin can be dangerous for some people. Yet some vaccine promoters try to pretend that vaccines are somehow different and safe for everyone. That is simply not true. Suitable for the vast majority of people - not all. Question is whether you have any way of knowing, before you vaccinate your child, whether they have any risk factors that make it problematic. A family history of auto-immune disease might be relevant here.

The groups who can't be vaccinated have been identified. Rare side effects CAN be detected quickly. For example, the first rotavirus that was intoduced had a serious side effect that affected one in 10,000 children. It was picked up and the vaccine discontinued.

Any intervention carries risks. But not vaccinating carries risks. For the vast majority of children, other than those belonging to certain groups (varies by vaccine), vaccines are safe.

Of course people should ask questions. I do. Before I decided to vaccinate I checked the following:
What is this disease? Is it common? Is it serious? Is it treatable - and how is it treated? What are the side effects?

Even with CP which isn't a serious disease, the vax is a very very safe one so I vaccinated although I was on the fence for a while on that one. But as time has gone one, I'm becoming more confident it was the right decision.

the first mmr vaccine used in the uk ha known, reported issues and had been withdrawn form use elsewhere.

but it was still introduced.

I would agree that side effects CAN be picked up (and reported) but they often aren't.

they are dismissed instead.

the whole Urabe farce shoudl never have happened in the uk. but it did.

We didn't vaccinate our dc. It wasn't until some years later that we discovered there was a very strong family history of auto-immune disease.

So it's just as well we didn't let them have the vaxes - even though we didn't know at the time that there were compelling reasons why they shouldn't have them.