Still a need for vaccines

I was still in college and long from thinking about actually having kids when a friend of mine, who was in med school, decided he didn't want to go into pediatrics. He loved kids - it was dealing with the parents that he feared would be too frustrating. He had gone to school for medicine and had treated patients in developing countries with diseases most of us assume were last a threat to our grandparents' generation, yet he'd encounter parents who trusted Google over his professional opinion regarding the need for vaccinations.

I agreed with my friend that vaccines are important and can't understand any more now than I could then why some people are so vehemently against them. Except now the debate is more personal as I have kids and know that parents who are against vaccinations aren't just putting their own kids at risk, but their communities as well.

Not everyone can be immunized, such as those with compromised immune systems, or can be fully immunized, like babies, but a concept known as "herd immunity" keeps the majority of these populations healthy. The more people immune to a disease, the less likely the disease can find a foothold in a community and spread. (Doctors see chinks in vaccination armor) So when a mom from my mom's group said that she wasn't immunizing her kid because she and her siblings weren't immunized and turned out fine, my opinion is that they got lucky, and that they otherwise had those of who received vaccines (like my brother and me) to thank for their good health.

Now that herd immunity is being quickly compromised for Oliver's generation as more and more parents opt out of vaccinations for their children. (And I will note that underinsurance, lack of insurance and not being aware that the State of Minnesota offers free immunizations to children play a part in declining vaccination rates of children. Currently between 60 and 75% of toddlers have not been fully vaccinated, depending upon which study is quoted...either way, well below the rate needed for most diseases for "herd immunity" to be effective.) With a vaccination for measles, there should not be outbreaks like the two we've had in Minnesota this year, which have sickened mostly babies too young for vaccinations and younger unnaccinated children. It makes me so sad that parents gamble with their children's health by not vaccinating them, but in the case of the Minnesota outbreak, most of the cases occurred within an immigrant community who've been led to believe that vaccinations cause autism.

The claims that vaccines cause autism or other disorders, despite lack of proof for that argument, drives me nuts. The research by the British doctor (Andrew Wakefield) who started the whole vaccines cause autism paranoia has been outed as a fraud and the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine recently released an extensive study that concluded there is no link between vaccines and autism. (IOM report) So even though most of what comes out of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's mouth is outrageous, (she is currently doing damage control after her claim that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation) what is not laughable is the media attention those with star power garner with their unsubstantiated comments. Whether it's Michele Bachmann or Jenny McCarthy questioning the safety of vaccines, they are not helping the declining vaccination rates in this country.

Even if people don't believe there's a link to vaccines and specific disorders, the vaccines and autism debate has effected, I believe, my generation's trust of vaccines. Even though the woman mentioned earlier is the only person who's ever told me that her child is completely unimmunized, many others have confessed an unease about whether it's safe for such little babies to have so many injections. Or they think the number or what the vaccines protect against is overkill. They can't pinpoint the origins of their concerns and some have even talked to their children's pediatricians, but still, a stuffed-in-the-back-of-their-mind paranoia still remains.

We have to make so many decisions on behalf of our kids and I understand how prevailing trends or stories of freak situations can make one second guess everything. But I wish we hadn't come to the point where something like vaccines, with all the hard data there is to support them, has become something up for debate. Most of my generation, thankfully, has never experienced potentially deadly diseases like measles or whooping cough, and we have vaccinations to thank for that.