Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk 1025
New submitter haroldmandel writes in with a story about the increase of certain diseases in school-age children due to parents not having their kids vaccinated. "Parents nervous about the safety of vaccinations for their children may be causing a new problem: the comeback of their grandparents' childhood diseases, reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Despite the successes of childhood immunizations, wrote Penn Nursing researcher Alison M. Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, in the American Journal of Public Health, controversy over their safety has resulted in an increasing number of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated and obtaining legally binding personal belief exemptions against vaccinations for their children."
They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. The only exemptions should be for allergy or other medical problems - those are sufficiently rare that herd immunity should not be compromised.
How is this news now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every reputable medical doctor, along with every pundit even slightly knowledgable about medicine or even basic biology has been warning of this issue ever since the antivaxxer morons got their idiotic campaign going.
There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that, rather than "Despite the successes of childhood immunizations", it would be because of those successes that the 'controversy' is presently raging...
Because of the effectiveness of widespread childhood vaccination, we've had at least a generation of people with minimal firsthand exposure to all the wacky pathogenic fun that used to be quite common. Plus, depending on the herd immunity requirements for a given pathogen and vaccine, being part of the first n% of opt-outs is basically cost-free. It isn't until you get closer to herd immunity breakdown that being unvaccinated starts to carry any serious additional risk of infection.
If you have a situation where people's knowledge of the risks is largely historical and the odds are pretty good that you can free-ride your way past them in any case, it (sadly) seems only to be expected that there would be room for assorted controversy to flourish.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, parents who don't should be forced to wear dunce hats in public as they are usually to thick to even have a remotely reasonable reason why.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Wow what a slippery slope that is... So for instance should H1N1 vaccinations be required? What about flu shots? If everyone got the flu shot we would likely run out before the high risk people (the young and elderly) had a chance to get it. Not to mention the potential side effects of many vaccines. Personally I and my children are vaccinated for everything I consider a serious disease (polio, etc.), but not H1N1 for instance because the chance of death is practically non-existent. In a free society you have the choice to be stupid... If you take away that choice then its no longer a free society.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:3, Insightful)
Earth, Hitler. 1938.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's implicit in the definition of "society". If you don't participate, you're just a parasite clinging to the side.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad Risk Assessment (Score:5, Insightful)
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:2, Insightful)
Your problems aren't with a slippery slope. Your problems are with an over broad statement that you have found some practical concerns of implementation.
However, the reason we would run out of flu shots before everybody got it is because of the production levels are where they are, not because more can't be produced. That said, you are correct that the flu shot is a temporary thing, but the problem in the statement you object to is a lack of technical qualification to it, which could be remedied with a limitation to serious diseases for which the vaccines will last a considerable period of time as opposed to something seasonal like the flu.
The OP didn't make that distinction, but it's not a slippery slope problem that they didn't.
Also, let's consider this, is a society truly free if other people are free to harm you?
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk.
Another example of the reason why stupid should be painful. And given the topic, fatal.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:3, Insightful)
And increasing the odds for the disease to develop resistance against vaccination. Sick people spread millions of little bits of virus around, some of those have mutations, and some of those mutations will make them resistant against current vaccines. A mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated people is probably the best possible breeding ground for resistant strains.
So how does rapine of corporations (Score:2, Insightful)
So how does rapine of corporations change medical fact?
Vaccines work and not vaccinating your children cause infections in others.
GSK empploy people. Does that prove employing people is SCAREMONGERING???
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't use a condom, the only people at risk are you and your partner. (Well, and anyone else that person sleeps with, but the immediate risk is just the two of you.)
If you don't get vaccinated, you can spread diseases to people who are too young to get vaccinated, people who's vaccinations didn't take (vaccination isn't 100% effective for everyone), people who can't get vaccinated due to allergies/illness/etc. And you don't have to have intimate contact with these people. Walk by one of them in a store and you might have passed on your virus. Sneeze on your hand, touch your desk, and you'll pass your virus on to the person who sits there next class period. This is bad enough when we're talking about something minor like a cold. However, if you're talking about whooping cough, mumps, or polio, your lack of vaccination could mean severe injury or death to someone else.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why they need educated. And the education system itself is to blame for this. Too much rote learning, and not enough learning how to learn and learning how to think. It's not terribly difficult to sit down and think for a second and realize that if you dont get vaccinated, you're dependent on everyone else still getting vaccinated in order to not get sick. And even then, that still leaves "outside the herd" sources of infection, as well as diseases that arent transmittable (and have no herd immunity effect), such at Tetenas (spelling, I know).
But that requires thinking and reasoning skills, and too many people seem to only have the ability to yell at the tv "Stupid conservatives/liberals".
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
nd what if I don't want to live in society? Fine. But TFA is about parents sending unvaccinated kids to school. They do want the benefits of society, but not any responsibility
Mandatory Vaccines? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post could be shortened to "I don't know how vaccination works".
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
That's the only slightly correct sentence in your post. But all the conclusions you draw are wrong.
Immunization via vaccination is based on exactly that fact: Given an healthy immune system, an exposition to the Poliovius will create an immune answer which a) stops the Poliovirus from spreading and b) gives you a lifelong protection. And that's how vaccination works. Your body gets a dose of dead or at least deactivated Poliovirus, your healthy immune system creates the immune answer, and you gain lifelong protection -- and that without the risk of actually catching Poliomyelitis, which an exposition to the real thing would yield.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read TFA? or at least TFS?
These children which aren't getting vaccinated because their parents don't understand science are putting other children at risk.
So it may not be their own children which natural selection sorts out, it may be the children of parents who have accepted that vaccines work, aren't more likely to cause autism, and aren't part of some government conspiracy.
So their "personal belief exemptions" are putting the lives of other people at risk -- basically they've gotten the right to become potential carriers of disease:
You can't just have people opting out of things which is intended to prevent disease in greater society if it puts other people at risk. You're free to choose for yourself, but not when you're talking about communicable disease.
Someone needs to explain to these parents that the rest of the world shouldn't bear the risk of them being stupid. If it was only them and their offspring who might be affected, go ahead. But it isn't.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a slippery slope. Vaccination recommendations and requirements (yes, you are quite rightly required to be immunized in some places, for some things), are based on a quantitative risk/benefit analysis.
It actually amazes people from outside the US that children unvaccinated for things like whooping cough would be allowed into a public school.
Re:They're stupid (Score:0, Insightful)
Justify why a newborn needs a hepatitis b vaccine. Go ahead call me stupid when I've done the research.
1. The major forms of transmission for hepatitis b are anal sex and iv drug use. If my newborn son is involved in either one of those then I have much bigger problems to worry about.
2. According to the CDC there were only a few thousand incidences of it per year in the entire U.S. for minors (population about 40 million). This population includes children who traveled to and from third world countries, teenage drug users, and homeless/runaway kids. These are not problems I'm worried about in my newborn son.
3. If you are alergic to bakers yeast then you will likely be alergic to the hepatitis b vaccine. It's hard for me to get aggregate numbers on this population, but it is a pretty common allergy.
Why should I stress my son's immune system out with this vaccine when it is clearly not needed at a young age. My son did get vaccines like the DTAP, but my state has no legal mechanism for me to choose the good vaccines like DTAP and exclude ones like hepatitis b. I can understand why parents who do a little research choose to exclude all vaccines because it's an easier legal position to defend. In order to know which vaccines my son should get, I had to essentially become and expert in each vaccine. You have not helped this issue at all by just dismissing me as stupid.
At some point in the future I might be forced to get my son the hepatitis b in order to enter school. However, delaying this as long as possible so we can indentify his allergies and allow him immune system to grow makes sense to me.
However, since you obviously just think I'm stupid (as well as the people who modded you up), why don't you explain the error in my logic?
Re:Rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Not vaccinating your kid exposes mine to potentially life-threatening disease. If you think that the (vanishingly small) risk of complications from vaccination is more important than my (vaccinated) kid's risk of contracting a disease that has mutated inside your (unvaccinated) kid.. well, you're bad at math. And, a selfish short-sighted asshole.
I've never really understood why it is that something you were going to do anyway becoming mandatory means that you should automatically resist it. You've lost nothing except the choice you weren't going to make, and society has benefited. Making vaccinations mandatory is not the same as Hitler storming across Europe, get a grip. If the slope were really that slippery, we would have fallen down into the abyss a long long time ago.
Obligatory car analogy: Sure, you have the right to drive around with faulty brakes. At least in this state, you do not need working brakes to pass the yearly inspection. You can argue that you're risking nobody except yourself.. except, you're not. Your passengers, and the other people on the roads that you slam into because you can't stop, would disagree.
Part of living in a civilized society is recognizing when your actions have consequences for others that have no say in the matter. Yes, you can make the choice not to vaccinate your kid. But realize that your actions have consequences for others. (It may come as a shock to you that there are other people in the world besides you and your child.) One of the major problems we (USA) have as a society is the attitude of "I've got mine, fuck you." Take responsibility for your choice; keep your kid away from mine. If your idealism leads to my kid's death.. then it's not worth protecting. Die for your ideals if you want; it's your life to throw away.
Re:There's a shock... (Score:1, Insightful)
Insanity is in the eye of the beholder.
My issue with vaccines have to do with their quality. Injectable vaccines around where I live contain a preservative based on mercury. Why? Well, it's cheap, we mass produce vaccines and need to keep the price down. Economics.
The general belief is that vaccines help more than they hurt, that being said, for the 5% (or whatever the statistics happen to be) for the patients who have a more violent reaction, their illness was caused by the vaccine, the very thing that everyone believes was supposed to protect them. And if not for that exposure, they would be perfectly healthy. Another side effect. And that's another price to pay for an effective campaign against diseases that doctors work to protect their patients against. How do we reduce that number? Well, further R&N => more expenses... Economics.
So it isn't insane to suggest that we all need to be aware of the quality of vaccine we permit our kids to be exposed to. Certainly my position is not an extremist position like "no vaccines", but I'll be exercising my freedom to chose.
For all you "gentlemen" out there supposing that freedom is a bad thing, you might as well be advocating for more Airport Security, higher population densities in FEMA camps and the outright ban on aluminum foil so that other people who actually think about the issues can't get any for their hats!
I think extremism is the actual "danger factor" with the issue of vaccines or any issue (especially religion).
Re:Why do the Vaccine's need to be filled with CRA (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention that mercury was blamed for "vaccines cause autism." They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose. So they changed their claim of why "vaccines cause autism" to something else. Every time the link they claim is proven false, they move the goal posts somewhere else so they can claim that "vaccines cause autism" hasn't *really* been disproven and that the burden is on everyone else to disprove claim #1,263.
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is your sole argument, that someone is lobbying the government to force people to get vaccinated so these companies can make money, you've lost any semblance of logical argument.
The fact that you consider homeopathic to be medicine, which it isn't, and choose to focus on the money aspect, which is completely irrelevant to the medically sound reason to be vaccinated, shows your lack of common sense.
I can assure you when people were being vaccinated for smallpox or polio, no one gave a rats ass about who was making a profit, or if a profit was even being made. All they cared about was that the yearly sweeps of infections that plagued the country came to a stop.
Are you now going to complain about all the money those big bad corporations made eradicating smallpox and polio? How about rinderpest, an equally devastating disease which has afflicted animals since before the time of Greeks? Are you going to complain about the money corporations made selling this vaccine to the animal industry to innoculate animals to prevent them from getting infected and making it the second time in human history that a disease has been wiped from the face of the Earth?
It seems counter-intuitive to complain these companies are making money to produce a product which will, eventually, make the use of that product unnecessary (in the case of smallpox and rinderpest). After all, wouldn't it be easier to make something which only treats the symptoms rather than cures it? That way they could have a perpetual source of income.
You and Jenny McCarthy would make a great pair. You should go on tour.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the anti-vaxxer movement could be a fantastic way of getting dumbfuck retards out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, as can be seen by TFA, anti-vaxxing doesn't affect only its adepts but also innocent people around them. Too bad.
Here in my own country, we have a vaccination plan with quite a few mandatory vaccines. Everybody has a little booklet we call the Vaccination Bulletin, where the nurses keep track of all the vaccines we take. We go to a Health Centre and get vaccinated for free. Kids can't attend public school unless they show their Vaccination Bulletin and prove all the mandatory vaccines are in order. Everybody vaccinates their kids. The only exceptions I can think of is ghetto people who may not do it, out of neglect. And anyway, only a very small minority of them.
Maybe you could institute a similar policy in the USA. If the nut heads don't want to vaccinate their kids, they should home school them. That would keep their little walking petri dishes away from normal children. Yes, for an American this may sound like anti-freedom, but I think my freedom of not getting infected with a bunch of crazy diseases far outweighs the rights of other people to be dumbfucking stupid. And I believe the anti-vaxxer crowd is a very small minority, even in the USA (here they're non-existent). Why should they have the right to hurt the vast majority of normal people?
Vaccines protect people in the developed world from a huge bunch of diseases that were eradicated decades ago or only exist in third world countries. Do you Americans really want to become Uganda in the name the freedom to be stupid? Get a fucking grip, already!
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the people who can't be vaccinated for genuine allergic reasons. They rely on the vast majority of normal people getting done and are the really really innocent parties when the negligent parents won't vaccinate their own.
Re:They're stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
The point of 'universal' vaccination for hep B is that it's hard to determine who will be at risk when they grow up (at least these days). Adolescents are also at some risk given their tendency towards risky behavior. They hardly ever get preventative care. Thus, you immunize everybody and you catch that small number that 'really need' the vaccine.
Also, hep B is endemic in some populations, even in the US and this gets around what amounts to racial profiling.
That said, I'm not really happy that the American Academy of Pediatrics has jumped on the immunize-everything mantra. I think it's a policy that causes a lot of ill will and gets a group of people (a fairly large group in this case) to forgo everything.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mandatory Vaccines? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting how "my body, my choice" has such limited applicability.
Typhoid Mary would agree you if she were alive today.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the fraudulent distortions of the anti-vax crowd is heir claim that disease rates were going down anyway.
Sounds familiar... Oh yeah: "We don't need the IT people anymore - the machines are running fine!"
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
>Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose
It seems that very often one cannot take a walk on a street without touching someone's overstretched nose.
Re:They're stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
If your kid is vaccinated does it really matter THAT much if other kids are not?
If presence of non-vaccinated kids increases the chances for your kid to get sick so dramatically, may be vaccination itself is not that effective?
The whole purpose of vaccination of a person is to prevent (diminish the probability of) this person from being infected from a contagious person and if having couple of unvaccinated kids in the class dramatically changes that, then what is really the effectiveness of such vaccination?