Childhood diseases

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Edited By Hopper on 27/05/2019 05:29:03

Edited By Hopper on 27/05/2019 05:29:30

Is dragging the rusty sheriffs badge along the grass ok?

Mike

You misunderstand vaccination, it isn't like antibiotics. A vaccine generates a "natural immunity" to a disease just like having the disease does. As your experience shows, having the disease "naturally" doesn't confer lifelong immunity, nor does vaccination, but if a high enough proportion of a population are vaccinated it stops epidemic spread of the disease and saves lives, usually of young children. Would we want to risk hundreds of children having to be kept alive on ventilators because we stopped vaccinating against polio? Or slowly dying of TB because we stopped the BCG jab and the antibiotics don't work any more? Those were scourges that were still around when I was born in 1950.

Surely the point of vaccination is not that it is perfect, but that it reduces the chances of your child being one of the thousands who die from measles etc to being one of the half dozen who die from reaction to the vaccine?

Hopper,

Very succinctly put. I wish I'd said that.

Colin.

Hopper my sentiments entirely particularly having one daughter vaccine damaged.

Dave W

Remember, not so many years ago, the MMR controversy? A number of children had suffered very bad side affects, and mothers were refusing to allow their children to have it. It turned out that the risks from the vaccine were insignificant compared to the dangers to the children who did not have it. But the damage was done.

I think it was shown (by proper statisticians/epidemiologists) that this was a case of post hoc, propter hoc **LINK** , shortly after they had been give the triple vaccine a small number of children were found to have problems, it doesn't mean the vaccine caused it. There was another famous case of some academic finding leukemia clusters in Seascale, so it must be radiation from Sellafield. Turned out to be due to influx of construction workers from other parts of the country

Sorry to hear that Dave. Must be awful for those so affected. The numbers of course don't take into account the human tragedy involved, just that there is less of it. Which could be small consolation when you are "it".

Edited By Hopper on 28/05/2019 00:28:43