oh good.
my ds i unvaccinated to this point. dh and I regularly review this, and there is every chance that at some point he will be vaccinated for tetanus and polio (for eg, if we decided to go and live somewhere where the risks of these diseases were greatly increased).
the reason he is unvaccinated, was that initially I felt on an instinctual level that innoculating an 8 week old that was fully breastfed (and therefore had my immunity) was unnecessarily early. I questioned why the schedule had changed so much and came to the conclusion that the vax schedule is based on the premise that unless GPs and Health Visitors 'get' parents when they 'have' them (i.e. when parent and baby are visiting the clinics) they may 'slip through the net'. This didn't seem a good reason for me to vaccinate and initially I just wanted more time to decide.
I did more reading and came across (in the book 'What Really Woks for Kids') the name of a homeopath that specialises in unvaccinated, and vaccine damaged children. Her book An Educated Decision is not anti-vaccinations. It goes into detail (often harrowing) of exactly what the diseases do and how they are contracted, who is at most risk, and what the best case and worst case scenarios are. She argues that vaccinating children is a valid decision and it will protect them from said diseases, but that there may a price to pay in terms of their overall health. She posits that the huge increase in conditions such as eczema and Asthma may be linked vaccination. Most importantly for me, when she saw us, she suggested that ds (then ten months old, and having developed eczema) come off cows milk. Neither of the GPs we saw suggested this, they immediately prescribed steroid cream. His eczema vanished as soon as we cut cows milk out of his diet.
I started to trust her based on this, and her reasonable stance.
She has proved worth her weight in gold time and time again, where we have been let down by GPs, she has resolved conditions that antibiotics have failed to do.
Most importantly of all, she alerted us to the risks of thimerosal when the Dept of Health were still claiming there were none. As you all know it was withdrawn from the schedule, albeit with no acknowledgement of the risks or the reasons that all other Western countries America and Japan included had withdrawn it from vaccines already.
I trust her a hell of a lot more than I do the Dept of Health. I also (and hate saying this as I'm more than willing to acknowledge that this is fluke) do not know any vaccinated child that has not been to hospital with raging temp and possible meningitis/pneumonia/etc, only to be discharged the next day/day after with no one any the wiser as to what that was. I think this may be about the body reacting to the subtle damage cased by vaccinating in terms of the development of the immune system, but am entirely willing to accept it is totally anecdotal and speculative. 8 children ds's age off the top of my head have had this experience.
Part of the reason for not vaccinating ds is that he has serious auto-immune conditions on one side of the family: dh and his sisters all suffered from terrible eczema as kids, and one of his sisters still has life threatening asthma. In the literature that argues against blanket vaccination and also focusses on possible damaging consequences (and i'm not talking about just anaphylactic shock reactions, but more low level stuff) the case is made that a propensity to these conditions is a contraindicator for vaccination.
Ds is (touch wood touch wood touch wood) extraordinarily healthy. He has loads of coughs and colds (esp since starting nursery, but he has never suffered anything worse in his life and I haven't taken him to the doctor for at least a year (he is 3 1/2).
This is working for us at the moment. We worry about it periodically, but talk through it, read some more and decide that right now, we are not going to vaccinate.