For thinking i shouldn't be getting constantly pestered by the local nurse and GP team to get my daughter immunises when i've repeatedly told them my answer is no?

[Lowla]

My daughter is 4. She got all her jabs as a baby, but i stopped at the MMR one. Since we missed the appointment, i've been getting loads of letters to invite us to the clinic for the MMR jab and now her school booster jab for some other virus. (Hib or something like that).

I've phoned the GP and asked them not to send any more letters out as i've chosen not to get her immunised any further for my own personal reasons, and worries over her last reactions to the jabs. And now i've got some nurse calling me asking to do a home visit next week to 'check on me and dd'. I asked 'is this about the jabs?' and she said, rather reluctantly, 'yes'.

AIBU for feeling like they should respect my decision?

Sorry for the bad grammar. Writing this in a rush as i have to run and get dd from school.

My ds is 17 and had 20 odd febrile convulsions the last one at 13. He and my family have gefs+ which means they get fc over 5. It is very rare for children to get fc over 5. Gefs+ is very rare and only recently discovered. We can trace it back to at least my geandmother.The reason i got ds all his vaccines was because the diseases are more likely to cause the fc than the vaccines.

Crikey, fair enough and we all misread at times, I can see how it happened.

I don't want to bang on about Wakefield because it derails thread after thread after thread, and vaccine safety gets lost in the arguments about his actions. And that is a red herring, to my mind, because you'll never convince his supporters, most people don't give a stuff, and it turns into a handful of posters still reading and arguing when everyone else is long gone.

I grew up in a house led by a wheelchair bound polio survivor.
He spent every day of his adult life partly focused on saving other people from what he went through.
Not only were his motor nerves destroyed by that AWFUL disease, but it hurt like fury for the three months he had it.

I'm sorry but I come back to my basic point :
In sub saharan africa, mothers queue for days to give their children the chance of a disease free adulthood that some in the west so casually reject.

HVs and GP know that imunisation is 1000 times cheaper than treatment
and they are forced to justify expenditure
so can you BLAME them for wanting immunisation over ICU ?

Would you really want ICU for your child?
as the 'non'vaccine' brigade always seem to assume that it will magically not happen to them....

PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE every time

Your choice tough i think she should not be allowed to attend school until she has them

And keep your child away from places were pregnant women might be

And i love the way that many who are foolish and wont keep other safe if not there own kids are vaccinated themsleves.

The cohort currently at uni should have had their mmr when the Wakefield autism link came out - consequently many of them didn't.

This can't be right surely? When did Wakefield make his comments about finding MMR strain measles in the guts of autistic children? It's just that my dd is 16 and when she had her jabs I'd never heard of Wakefield. By the time ds was the right age for his the papers were full of it, one reason why we paid for the single vaccines. It's not the sort of thing I'd forget as it was a lot of money to us and a decision not taken lightly but ds had already had a bad reaction to previous jabs and bowel problems which he still has so it was all very relevant to us. Ds is 12, I can't imagine many of his friends going to Uni .

People all have their opinions on Wakefield but it's hardly fair to blame him for every epidemic going back to the year dot.

Its a bold bold decision one I wouldnt dare take on behalf of my DCs. I personally couldn't deal with the guilt if they caught a disease that I had chosen (with no good reason) not to let them be vaccinated against. Have you seen adult mumps? DH caught it randomly in his late twenties he was so so sick we were told there was a real possibility we would never have children. My grandmother was deaf due to measles as a child, a friend lost her boyfriend to meningitis. If you are confident none of these will affect your child then refuse vaccination personally couldnt deal with the guilt.

It was 98 which would have affected the uptake of boosters to those at uni now. Ds was born in 95 and booster was given just before the started school. Ds hs his thw say before his 5th birthday.
Also not sure when booster was introduced.

Pixel
I dont,
but the drop in Measles / Mumps / rubella protection can be dated directly to his 1998 paper which was picked up by the London press and affected current 17/18 year olds and all children younger.

(NB As I've said above, do not confabulate MMR with meningitis outbreaks at Universities that heralded HiB jabs)

BUT
Having this minute seen a bit on the BBC TV news about the antenatal vaccine on offer FFS he's got a lot to answer for in the insecurity he bred.

I have just seen that. That poor baby. I could barely watch it.

I really do believe in vaccinations. Doctors etc are not out to poison us but to prevent horrible illnesses for making a comeback, like whooping cough and measles are now, due to people like the OP.

i agree the hib vaccine protects against infections in the brain ,spinal cord,meningitis,septicaemia pneumonia.please read--nhs choices meningitis causes-----mumps was the leading cause of meningitis.

in the uk we are so lucky to have an nhs---- doctors ,nurses ,treatments and vaccines we should be so grateful.in third world countries babies /children die of terrible dieseases and also our relatives eg great great great grandmas would have done anything to have their children vaccinated IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THERE DREAM TO HAVE AN NHS AND VACCINES, instead they had to witness their child suffer i dread to think what they went through.
what country you are born in is luck of the drawer.
please parents be grateful for medical care and vaccines available to us and have your child vaccinated.
i cannot believe some parents are so selfish and ruthless putting others at risk and starting an epidemic what happened in history and other third world countries .when the nhs is here to help and protect us now.x
ps think about babies 0 day old to 15 months who are too young to be covered /vaccinated.10 babies have died recently from whooping cough.also there has been 2 well known footballers had meningitis recently so ther is reported cases.nip this in the bud .PLEASE VACCINATE /PROTECT YOUR BABY/CHILD.

(bethjoanne)
I'm normally anti bringing emotion into threads
as anecdote does not make evidence
but what you said above you have been through shits all over the "it won't happen to me " brigade.

If you can face it, clinical, graphic details might just make the non vaccine brigade question the risks they are taking with their mitochondrial line..

I see your point, must admit I hadn't thought about those who were a bit older and due for boosters at the time. Still, 1998 is only 14 years ago, 17/18 years olds are not at uni are they so I'm still right!

yes my daughter did have meningitis.she had a heavy cold so i delayed her 2 month first vaccine for 1 month .now i wish i hadnt i do feel so guilty.

The big jump in the rise in people not vaccinating or having singles was just before my ds was due for the MMR, and he's 12 now. The same as Leo Blair when there was all the media hoo haa about whether he was having it. So '98 onwards sounds about right.

Fear of vaccination has been around since the first vaccine (smallpox?), it would be difficult though obv not impossible to blame Andrew Wakefield for that too

OP

If your child reacted to vacines how the hell do you think she will react if she comes in to contact with the disease?

Thanks to people like you, I had mumps a few years ago, and am now partially deaf in one ear.

Thanks to people like you, both my DDs and I are ill with whooping cough. DD2 is particularly ill as she already has bad asthma. As do I. Do you have any idea how awful whooping cough is when you have asthma? All DD2 and I can do is sit on the sofa, and cough and wheeze. For DD2, that has been going on since the middle of August. It is horrific.

And 10 babies have died from it this year alone. That's the 10 babies that have been officially diagnosed with it. The HPA rang me this week, the 5000 odd cases that they are reporting are the ones that have been officially diagnosed via blood tests.

Only my DD2 has had the blood test. That means that for our household of 3 infected, only 1 has been counted. Repeat that over the country, and I think you'll get more of an idea of just how bad this epidemic is.

Because stupid, selfish fuckers who listen to scaremongering and can't think for themselves refuse to get their children vaccinated.

So you are quite happy not to vaccinate your precious child but to rely on the fact that 99+% of the children your PRECIOUS child will come into contact with will have been vaccinated therefore your your precious child will be less likely to contract any of these life threatening/altering diseases thanks to the majority of parents who are responsible enough to realise this.

Yep you are an idiot and I hope that if you ever have a daughter she never gets measles whilst pregnant or your son never gets mumps and becomes sterile.......... No you just rely on the rest of us for your herd immunity ........................

Sarah, that sounds miserable but a tad unfair to blame OP. OK, if MMR uptake was 95% there would be far fewer cases of mumps, but there'd probably still be a few amongst the many adults who were never vaccinated against it. (IIRC - and I am ready to be corrected - it wasn't available before they introduced MMR. Dh had mumps five times so I was quite relieved when we managed to conceive ds...)

Sarah isn't being unfair at all. She and her children are suffering because people like the OP have failed to vaccinate when they could have done so.

DD2 has just started her GCSE's. She is not likely to return to school for another 2-3 weeks, that's how ill she is. She's been ill since the 5th August, and she's still fucking ill. Ill enough to be up nearly all night whooping, and coughing, and trying to breathe. And being sick. I can't even begin to imagine how horrendous it is for a baby, or very small child, it tears me up just seeing my 15 year old suffering with it so badly.

She's got a school trip at the beginning of November. Our GP isn't sure she'll be well enough for that, so that will be an overnight trip to London and 2 shows she has been dying to see, missed. I'm not even going to think about how much that cost me.

Why should people benefit from herd immunity when they don't care enough about the herd to contribute to it? It's not fair on the wider society to not vacc children (unless there is a medical reason).

My eldest was born in '97 at the height of the mania and thank fuck I had friends in medicine who could advise me as I was so torn BTW.

I think yabu. You've taken a decision against medical advice which puts your child at risk. The health professionals have a duty of care to your child, and indeed all the community and they are doing the right thing.

I appreciate you have concerns so why not make an appointment with your gp to discuss? You need to know what the options are, what they can do to help and what risks there are by not vaccinating. How else can you make an informed decision? You're entitled to have your concerns listened to and addressed but it's quite right that the clinic should continue to contact you and encourage you to vaccinate if you haven't reached out to them to discuss.

Sarah - the whooping cough outbreaks are more to do with waning immunity than lack of primary/secondary immunisation. Most of the people getting it (and passing it on) have been immunised. If you google there's plenty of information on that (particularly in Australia and America where they have been struggling with whooping cough outbreaks for the last couple of years).