My Health Nut Parents Didn't Vaccinate Me-Unfortunately

[skepticscott]

http://www.thestar.com/life/2014/01/07/my_health_nut_parents_didnt_vaccinate_me_unfortunately.html

[demigoddess]

1. I am not a big medical science fan but vaccines are the one

thing that they did well. I have been vaccinated against just about everything including small pox, polio, cholera, typhoid, etc and I grew up quite healthy. Also I know a family that was all organic home grown vegetables and meat. The two children as adults have trouble digesting various vegetables. Don't understand why.

[Tumbulu]

2. This is a stupid article

The diseases that she contracted as a child they did not have vaccines for at the time. When I was a kid, we all got measles and mumps and chicken pox and on and on. We had the polio vaccine and the smallpox and tetanus vaccines, which were life saving. and still are. Nowadays there are so many more and for this I am quite grateful, but her implication that her parents exposed her unnecessarily to all these diseases is incorrect as they were not in use yet.

The article strikes me as rather manufactured and not genuine. Very preaching to the choir- like.

[winter is coming]

3. Not true. She states that she's a child of the 70's and was 19 in the 90's.

In the 70's, she would have been able to get vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough, four diseases she says she had.

[Tumbulu]

4. Perhaps whooping cough

But MMR wasn't until the '80's and she would have already had those by then.

Sorry it is manufactured hysteria, very obvious.

[winter is coming]

5. Again, not true. From wikipedia:

A licensed vaccine to prevent measles first became available in 1963, an improved measles vaccine in 1968. Vaccines for the mumps and rubella (German measles) became available in 1967 and 1969, respectively. The three vaccines (for mumps, measles, and rubella) were combined in 1971 to become the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine

Whether she had the MMR, or the three vaccines separately, they would have been available.

[Tumbulu]

7. Good grief, it takes awhile before

People commonly used those vaccines. If she was born in the early 70's she, as most children did, would have gotten all those before turning 10.

My point is that she is exaggerating the vaccines that she did not get by parental refusal and not discussing the ones not in widespread use.

[winter is coming]

8. It wouldn't take several years in a first-world country.

The vaccines were available and pediatricians were recommending them before this woman was born. In many places, you had to be current on your vaccination record to attend school.

[Tumbulu]

9. Look we can go back and forth about this

but the point I am trying to make is that most people of her age and older got all these diseases. Or we had parents whose behaviors reduced the risks of us catching them (ie never take a baby into any public places until 6 months of age, stuff like that) . Yes, there were polio and small pox and tetanus and whooping cough vaccines by her time, but all those others measles, mumps, rubella were just getting started vaccine wise and it is melodramatic to go on and on about it like she was unique in not getting them.

When I was growing up all the kids got measles and mumps and chicken pox and I knew no one who suffered any of the serious effects. Which is a nice thing to be able to say. but people of my age group are simply not as scared of these illnesses as the younger people of today are. Mainly perhaps because we all got them and they seemed normal to us. Her parents were most likely in that camp and she is most welcome to enter the modern world and vaccinate her children appropriately. But I really object to the put down and sort of dishing of her parents.

Lots of kids never even went to doctors regularly in those days, we sure did not. In fact growing up, I knew of no children who did. Times were quite different.

Of course, now it is all standardized, but it was not then and this article implies that her parents were particularly negligent or backward, when indeed there were lots of kids not immunized back then.

[trotsky]

10. Prove your claim.

I was born in the early 70s. I got the vaccines for all of those diseases - I never had a single one of them. Neither did any of the kids I grew up with. I guess my anecdotal evidence cancels yours out.

And while it's true that before those vaccines existed, the vast majority of children fought off measles, mumps, and rubella without incident, it is also true that those who didn't faced severe injury or death. For example, the purpose of the varicella vaccine isn't just to prevent two weeks of itchy, uncomfortable spots. It's to help protect those who could get seriously injured or killed by contracting chicken pox. It's also pretty damn convenient to NOT have to deal with missing 2 weeks of school.

[Tumbulu]

12. Good grief-

please stop with the endless hostility.

Yes, I am sure that plenty of people began getting these vaccines as soon as they became available and plenty did not.

And that parents of kids who had gotten these diseases did not think that much about them. Seriously, this is a discussion board, not a shouting gallery.

I was born in the 50's and seriously find the hysteria about these once common childhood diseases curious. Many people of my age react this way, and many children of the 70's had parents from the 40's and 50's and so this attitude was certainly not uncommon. Nor was it some big controversy, either.

[trotsky]

13. Correcting your false statements is not "hostility."

And I'm sorry you think concern over those injured or killed by those disease that yes, weren't too bad for most, is "hysteria." (Most people ride in their cars every day and don't crash, do you think telling people to buckle up is "hysteria" too?)

Clearly though since you are attacking people with these words and not their statements on this thread, you realize the weakness of your position and instead need to lash out. But it does appear that at least you've backtracked from your initial claim due to the data presented to you, so that's good.

Take care.

[Tumbulu]

14. No, your "corrections" appear quite hostile

and apparently there is some sort of problem with comprehending the meaning of the discussion.

And to conclude that there is attack from my side, while explaining a generational perspective in unfortunate, at best.

To be more clear : PEOPLE OF MY GENERATION DID NOT THINK THESE CHILDHOOD DISEASES WERE AS SERIOUS AS POEPLE OF YOUR GENERATION DO. WE HAD THESE DISEASES, WE HAD NO SEAT BELTS, WE HAD NO HELMETS FOR OUR BIKES, PEOPLE SMOKED ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Times have changed, we take all risks far more seriously now. We take all opportunities to reduce risk of injury or disease. But those cultural changes took place over a long time.

But the author's parents were living in the time when seat belts were just becoming mandatory, when car seats were just being invented for children and many many people did not vaccinate (thus there was more exposure to all of these diseases for those not vaccinated- which is why she had friends who caught those diseases. it was a new thing then). Huge segments of the population did not go to doctor's regularly - maybe not in Britain with a civilized socialized health system, but certainly here in the US it was spotty.

And I maintain that this article is very sensationalized and quite a propaganda piece. Not to say that propaganda pieces may be useful in this day and age of polarization of things to do with vaccines, but still to me, it smacks of propaganda.

[demigoddess]

15. my daughter and son

born 72 and 75 got the MMR vaccine in their first couple of years.

[Tumbulu]

16. if the author and her friends were actually getting these diseases

then a whole lot of kids were not vaccinated for them. If they were, the prevalence of the diseases would have been much lower.

Once most kids got them, the cases went down significantly.

[LeftishBrit]

17. Probably the family mixed a lot with other similar families...

so that there were a lot of unvaccinated kids in their social community. Not in the UK in general, however.

[Tumbulu]

18. When did universal health care get going in the UK?

In the 50's?

Here in the US we have had a much different situation.

My last TDaP was $110 and that was with insurance! How many kids did not get their vaccines because of how expensive they were? I live in a rural area and lots of children are not fully vaccinated here. In many rural counties in the US a good 30% of people have had no health insurance.

The first thing that the Affordable Care Act did for us on this side of the pond was make all vaccines "covered" or free of charge. Although there is a lot of underground rhetoric about vaccines being the cause of so many modern ills, it is my belief that it is a more sour grapes sort of thing. People could not afford to vaccinate their children- especially all the times recommended and so without insurance and not going to the doctor regularly, one may rationalize it by saying that they are "not really necessary", or that they may "do more harm than good", etc. But underneath it all, if one is struggling to buy food, or pay the rent, then these things can get put off. This "free" vaccination has radically changed the story for many millions of parents. And I do think that there will be a shift as a result of this.

[LeftishBrit]

19. 1948

Yes, I think that the free provision of vaccines is absolutely vital. And, indeed, of healthcare in general!

[Tumbulu]

21. Yes, so we shall see how things change

over here. I would expect it to take a few years. Also, we still have many undocumented workers who are still not covered, although in CA at least their children are covered through medical.

[Dorian Gray]

11. I was born in 1971.

I certainly had the MMR vaccine as I never had any of those illnesses.

[LeftishBrit]

6. While I think the author does not always make it clear...

which vaccinations she didn't get because her parents didn't vaccinate at all, and which she didn't get because the vaccinations just weren't invented at the time, it is certainly not the case that none of the vaccinations existed in the 70s.

I was born in the 60s, and I did get vaccinated against measles, and against rubella though the latter not till I was 12 or 13. Also against polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, smallpox (long since abolished), TB (nowadays, at least in the UK, only given to certain risk groups). Did catch mumps, though.

[bemildred]

20. There is, on the one hand, no more advantage in keeping, say, measles around than polio.

So where we have good vaccines, we should give them to everyone who can tolerate them, for free. I mean the government should pay for it. If you get it right, it's an investment in a disease-free future. Free of that disease anyway. No more smallpox. No more polio (soon I hope.)

On the other hand, it does need to be considered that the immune system needs exposure to pathogens to learn it's job. Sort of like your gut needs bacteria to work right, all illness is not "bad", all pathogens are not "bad", any more than all your negative experiences in life are "bad", you learn from them. We might want to keep some relatively benign ones around, at least until we are sure we don't need them.