To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate, that's one of the questions!

DISCLAIMER: My intent was to write a blog outlining the pros/cons of both sides of the coin, however I find I am way to much on the one side to fairly write about the other side. I apologize to those who were maybe looking for more info on why not to vaccinate. You won't find it here, sorry!

One of my favorite TV shows, "Law & Order" is famous in my books for writing shows that are very current in terms of what is going on in reality. Very "art imitating life". A week or so ago "Law & Order SVU" did a show on a baby dying. It actually starred 'Hilary Duff' (shout out to Kyla!) as a young mother. The story started out being about her being an unfit mom but it turned out her less than 12 month old baby died from the measles. They traced the measles to a woman who didn't believe in vaccinating her toddler who had gotten the measles and recovered. The problem was, measles is highly contagious and in the meantime, when he wasn't displaying any symptoms, she had taken him to a park where he had passed on the sickness to other kids who were too young to be vaccinated.

Here's some facts I learned about measles from Law & Order (I'm assuming they are true LOL):

-the virus or whatever causes the measles stays in the room after the infected person as left for 1 hour,

-it is contagious up to 200 yards away,

-you can be contagious for 21 days without having any symptoms.

Those are some scary facts! Especially since while yes, your kid could just get over it, they could also die from it. One of the important points the episode brought up for me in the whole vaccinating debate is that the decision you make not only effects your child but also other children around you. Are you willing to have the possiblity of other children's deaths & illness on your hands?

Jenny McCarthy is one of the leading voices on not vaccinating. Her son developed autism and she believes it was from vaccinations. Last I checked her son no longer displayed any autism symptoms due to a diet regimne she had him on. While I do love to take advice from celebrities, I've decided to research other opinions on the web...

I also think it's important to mention that one of my good-friend-from-growing-up's nephew has autism and when I mentioned Jenny McCarthy at our last social connection, my friend rolled her eyes and shook her head. It seems that Jenny may not be a voice for EVERYONE in the autism community!

Reasoning & quotes from those who do believe in Vaccinating:

-"largely because of the movement by a determined minority against vaccination, long eradicated diseases are gaining a new foothold, making vaccination as important as ever."

-"doctors are so worried about a potential public-health crisis that 22 medical and advocacy groups recently formed the Immunization Alliance in order to make sure that kids get immunized."

-kids can die from the diseases the vaccines prevent. If your child does get autism, he/she is still around for you to love & hold, if he/she dies they are not there at all.

-"The notion that childhood vaccines cause autism is a belief based on anecdotal experiences that is not backed up by the facts. There is now good scientific evidence that such a relationship does not exist. But not vaccinating children, or delaying to do so, can potentially have serious individual and public health consequences. The collective time lost from school, the individual misery, and the formidable complications (brain injury, deafness, and others) make it worthwhile to once again make those diseases obsolete."

-"Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination, health officials reported Thursday.
Worried doctors are troubled by the trend fueled by unfounded fears that vaccines may cause autism. The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that’s only for the first seven months of the year. There were only 42 cases for all of last year."

-"When a major drop in rates of immunization against whooping cough occurred in the UK in 1974, there was an outbreak of more than 100,000 cases and 36 deaths by 1978."

-Diseases that vaccinations help prevent: measles, polio, smallpox, diphtheria, chicken pox, meningitis, mumps, whooping cough,

Reasoning from those who don't belive in Vaccinating:

-believe vaccinations are linked to autism, aggression and other learning disabilities (though there is allegedly no concrete evidence of a link),

-"immune function obviously didn’t achieve perfection through vaccines, and I suspected immune function was on the decline. Everyone’s always sick. These are my unscientific, not-supported-by-statistics, observations about the people around me. "

-"I think that parents need to really think about medical advice that's one-size-fits-all, whether it's for a vaccine or something else, they need to look at their individual child"

A friend of mine & I were discussing how hypocritical some of these non-vaccinators can be. A friend of her's gets very "passionate" about her beliefs and how "wrong" it is to vaccinate yet she sees no problem with smoking marijuana and breastfeeding (let alone smoking marijuana period).

Evidence - it appears that some of the studies that supported a link between autism and vaccinatations have since been retracted due to "conflicts of interest" coming out. It's always interesting how people's personal motivations can motivate "scientific results"!

Which ever decision you make or I make is sure to have pro's & con's. If one decision had no con's then the choice would be obvious. All we can do, all we can ever do, is to do CREDIBLE research, trust our instincts and hope for the best. I feel that it is VERY common for opinions to be passed on which utilizes on scare tactics more than evidence (a.k.a. the mania that is Swine Flu right now), especially with the internet as an available tool for any person to spread their uneducated opinion like a wildfire.

Personally, I like to be a proactive person and I believe the proactive choice in this situation is to vaccinate. That was the decision my mother made for me and I never got the measles, mumps, polo etc. A few generations before me they didn't have these vaccines and millions suffered or died from these diseases. I also believe that this decision also helps the general public health and I'd like to be a positive contributor to society out of education then a negative contributor out of fear. I am also very skeptical of anything that appears to be more of a "hippie" attitude bucking the system than conventional wisedom. I don't believe in living my life in fear that some fictionalized man in a suit with money is buying political opinions and FDA approvals. However, that being said, if Michael Moore did a documentry on Vaccinates, he definitely has the power to sway me LOL That's the way the scales have tipped for me, what have/will you decide?

I also can't help but feel that this topic closely shadows the religious beliefs regarding blood transfusions etc, where certain people believe that they'd rather put their trust in their God then medical science. While I agree that medical science is more of an art than a science, I also feel that I'd rather do EVERYTHING I could to stack the odds in my favor.

Additional Comment: It's kind of like smoking. Yeah it's your decision, except that when you do it (smoke or not vaccinate) that action impacts the rest of the world (second hand smoke and increased disease breakouts respectively). One of the arguments of non-vaccinators is that it doesn't affect other children however it does:
-the ones who are too young to get vaccinated yet,
-those who the vaccine was unsuccessful with,
-those who are unable to get vaccinated due to medical reasons (such as an auto immune disease).

Interesting Articles:

Consequences of Not Vaccinating (Apr 6/09): http://momblog.santarosamom.com/default.asp?item=2360272

Rare Sickness Kills Child; Officials Urge Vaccination (Jan 23/09) :

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/23/hib.vaccine.cdc/index.html

Sources:

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2008/09/to-vaccinate-or.html

http://cdc.gov/vaccines/

http://www.vegfamily.com/vaccines/deciding-not-vaccinate.htm

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/04/earlyshow/contributors/emilysenay/main531638.shtml

http://www.kelownaparents.com/?p=247

For more information on vaccines in Canada, visit one of the sites below:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/im/index-eng.php
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hl-vs/iyh-vsv/med/immuniz-eng.php
http://www.cps.ca/caringforkids/immunization/VaccinationChild.htm