To suggest immunisations should be a legal requirement?

[rednailsredheart]

Look at it like this:

Wearing seatbelts it purely a safety issue. It's also a legal requirement in the UK to protect car passengers.

So why is immunisation not a legal requirement?

Likewise, drinking and driving is a criminal offence, due to the danger to the passengers and other drivers/people around you.

But deliberately choosing to let your child become a carrier of a totally preventable disease, infecting people around them (including those too young for immunisations), is totally fine? If someone doesn't vaccinate their child, then the child subsequently becomes gravely ill, why aren't the parents charged with neglect?

Makes me think of this article

ONION

Anotherday Here is the relevant quote (It is the introductory paragraph):

Vaccination has greatly reduced the burden of infectious diseases. Only clean water, also considered to be a basic human right, performs better.1 Paradoxically, a vociferous anti vaccine lobby thrives today in spite of the undeniable success of vaccination programmes against formerly fearsome diseases that are now rare in developed countries.2

What I couldn't access was the reference 1: A short history of vaccines to understand the context of what was being quoted... Never mind, I wasn't able to link my quote so I am out of the game.

Heroic post seeminglyso.

I think there is something very deep in the human psyche about distrusting vaccines. These worries and suspicions have been around well over 100 years and cut across different cultures. It's not just a phenomena in rich Western societies. Look at the distrust of vaccines to irradicate polio in Pakistan.

Yes too many.... Mental loons called the Taliban trying to halt polio workers, conspiracy about UN spies .. Mad as a box of frogs..... Anti vaxxers worldwide have thier issues it seems.

.

Two members of my family were struck down by polio during the last epidemic. My grandma caught it when she visited a friend in hospital just after my mother was born. She never walked again.
My brother in law was infected as a baby and has suffered all his life and is still having ops now in his 70s to help keep him mobile a bit longer.

We are so close to polio being wiped out now. I feel sick when I read about kids being left exposed to polio today.

Yes, my FIL has no mobility in his hip from polio as well. It's a horrible disease.

It can be a horrible disease but in the vast majority of cases (>95%) people have mild, flu like illness or show no symptoms at all.

Seemingly - you say some people don't 'believe' in herd immunity. Do you think it's possible to create herd immunity in a population with a vaccination that wanes after a few years?

"It can be a horrible disease but in the vast majority of cases (>95%) people have mild, flu like illness or show no symptoms at all."

So that's all right then........

Toomanyexams

Look at the distrust of vaccines to irradicate polio in Pakistan.

That's not a vaccine issue. That's because the US sent in black ops agents to collect DNA from needles in their hunt for Bin Laden.

www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314231260/cia-says-it-will-no-longer-use-vaccine-programs-as-cover

It makes not a jot if it's true or not, just whether people believe it or not.

I'll have to check figures later but iirc around 1% of cases are paralytic polio and then a small percentage of those have any permanent sequelae.

And the % of people permanently damaged by the polio vaccine?

Aids used to be worse than it is now, doesn't mean I want to get it.

I think that once herd immunity

I don't understand the posters who made the connection between being forced to vaccinate, and being forced to donate breast milk.

I get it's meant to be a hard hitting comparison to make you think, but it just comes across as total bollocks. Formula feeding or breastfeeding a child makes no difference in whether or not they are more or less likely to catch a life threatening disease, or pass those on to other people.

Sigh. To be honest, if it was just anti vaxxers dropping like flies because they thought kumquat juice was more effective against disease than a vaccine, then I wouldn't care. Their choice, their consequences. But it isn't. It's also people who are unable to be vaccinated, or aren't old enough to be sufficiently vaccinated yet (like when you need the second vaccine a few years later before being totally covered).

Of course there's a risk, but it's a very tiny and hypothetical one.

Thousands of people have massive allergies to peanuts that could kill them. I severely doubt all these idiotic anti-vaxxers won't let their child anywhere near a bowl of peanuts throughout their entire lives JUST IN CASE they are allergic.

It does make me laugh that lots of people who are anti vaxx will be equally pissy about tax rates, and insist that welathy people should pay MORE MORE MORE and they should have to pay LESS LESS LESS.

So social responsibility is fine when they benefit, but not when it involves them doing anything. At that point it's all "AS A MOTHER.....I know what's best for my child and my responsibilities end THERE".

Bunch of tossers.

PS, I don't disagree with social welfare. I was just using it as a point of hypocrisy.

I think that once herd immunity dips below a certain point, and diseases that have up until now been eradicated come back, it might take a couple of decades, but I think laws will change that concern public services and vaccines. For example schools.

I do wonder what the anti vaxxers would do if Ebola did arrive in this country and there was a vaccine available. Or if a child in their child's school turned out to have TB. It always seems to be the vaccines for diseases they think of as not serious they are opposed to. Do people refuse tetanus jabs after injuries for example?

Hard to say with the under reporting of vaccine adverse reactions.

Don't forget you also have to factor in the risk of actually contracting the disease - it's not 100%

Dogelove, don't know if I fall into your anti vaxx category (not sure why you need the extra xs) but I certainly don't agree with taxing the rich more. I'm not sure what that proves though...

Hakluyt, the TB vaccine is notoriously ineffective. That's why they're trying develop new treatments and methods of prevention.

seeminglyso
The anti vax movement are totally immune to science and research and full of conspiracy theories about big phama.

Not sure how you define the 'anti vax movement'. Posters on here who have partially vaccinated or unvaccinated children don't seem to be requiring other people to make the same choices, so not 'anti vax' per se.

As for 'immune to science and research' - on threads such as this, my impression is the opposite. A number of posters who challenge the status quo seem to be pretty widely read. Whereas some of the contributors on here who are vociferously supportive of vaccination (to the point of being outraged that others choose differently), seem to have views that oddly conincide with, and don't vary from, the Public Health's Immunisation Programme and information.

Re: 'conspiracy theories about big pharma'. The criticisms and shortcomings of the pharmaceutical industry, including those relating to the mechanisms and processes for the introducion of drugs (and vaccines), and pharmacovigilance, are acknowledged within the industry and by organisations/individuals who are also supportive of vaccination.

"Hakluyt, the TB vaccine is notoriously ineffective. That's why they're trying develop new treatments and methods of prevention."

So. A child in your child's class is confirmed as having TB. Do you have your child vaccinated?

Your child puts a muck fork through her foot while working at a stables. Tetanus?

"Re: 'conspiracy theories about big pharma'. The criticisms and shortcomings of the pharmaceutical industry, including those relating to the mechanisms and processes for the introducion of drugs (and vaccines), and pharmacovigilance, are acknowledged within the industry and by organisations/individuals who are also supportive of vaccination."

The pharmaceutical companies have many questions to answer. This does not negate the huge body of independent research concluding that vaccination is a safe and effective way of controlling many diseases in the human population.

I really don't understand the "well, only a small percentage of people will be killed/maimed by x disease so it's actually kind of harmless, we shouldn't be worried about it coming back" idea. If it's contagious enough (and, for instance, measles is EXTREMELY contagious) then vast swathes of the un-immune population can catch it and that "small percentage" could be hundreds or thousands of people. There are, for instance, an estimated 7,500 people who are survivors of paralytic polio in Ireland.

I know two people with permanent disabilities from diseases we vaccinate against, it's not like it's almost impossible that these illnesses will have serious effects on people.

And of course we have the likes of this to contend with:
www.salon.com/2013/01/07/anti_vaccine_book_tells_kids_to_embrace_measles/

Of course it also helps if the right vaccinations are given: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-31144233