I enjoyed reading Aviva Jill Romm's book on vaccinations .... I learned quite a bit. My husband is reading it now, and when he's done we'll discuss and decide.

I agree with the overall benefits to society but that doesn't mean that I have to vaccinate my kid. The way I see it is that there are enough kids getting vaccinated and enough people who will be vaccinating their yet unborn children that it reduces the risks for my child so that I don't have to. Did that make sense? Well anyway I don't think vaccines for most things are a bad idea, I just am not gonna do it to my kid.

aaaaa, I appologize for starting this post and then neglecting it. Between travelling for 3 weeks and coming home to a broken computer I haven't had much time to go online, and since my computer is being sent away for repair today I wont be able to follow up very much either. So I will just leave everyone with a couple great resources.

www.nvic.com

also the book Natural Family Living by Peggy O'mara (Publisher of Mothering Magazine) has a great section on Vaccines. I also reccomend this book to any parent who has babies or small children. It gives good insight to so many topics we face as parents.

:)

not vaccinating, though I waffle on tetanus diptheria and polio when she's older.... and personally I believe that it harms society more than it helps (through all the "minor" side effects like increased allergies, ADD, brain damage that can't be proven, sterility cancer immune diseases etc there is just too much weird stuff happening tp us as a species - I just think its a safer bet to minimize all toxic exposure and vaccines areTOXIC) so I'm not counting on any "herd immunity" (which I don't actually believe exists) just good health good food and some luck.

without counseling anyone to vaccinate or not (I think it's individual) I have to say that I think the HiB and pnuemonia vaccines are based on fear.

the truth is, many people, including many infants and young children, do NOT have any serious illness from exposure to these common pathogens (and yes, I got an A in microbiology.)

one of my micro professors in fact told us that hemophilus infection is ubiquitous, or it was eleven years ago (vaccien is more common now)...almost everyone, like 90% of population, is seropositive for it my age 20. hmmm...so it's relatively rare that it causes meinigitis or other serious illness. many "nasty colds" turn out, if studied in a lab, to be bacterial or some virus that only occasionally goes ballistic.

same for S. pnuemoniae...I;ve never had pneuonia IN MY LIFE, not as a baby and not as a child or an adult, and I;ve caught plenty of colds over the years (and had all the old childhood viral diseases like chicken pox, measles, rubella, mumps, by age 8.) I;ve also never had systemic strep aureus, the kind that causes strep throat and scarlet fever...my child had it once , at age 4, and that's the one and only time I chose to give her an antibiotic 9and we went with old-fashined penicillin.)

there's this weird and kind of paranoid, in my opinion,modern belief that before antibiolotic and vaccines for every illness, ost people were at death's doorstep every winter, and that's just not the case. ask your parents and grandparents if they are still alive; they grew up fine and got nursed through the basic illnesses,m and probably have more vigorous immune systems as a result.

I had some form of pertussis or parapertussis, as far as I can tell, last January. I had the old DPT series in childhood but it;s acknoledged that pertussis vaccine was never meant to give lifelong immunity; it's there to get children through the most vulnerable period. 9some diseases are more serious in adults, like chickenpox or measles; some more in childhood, like pertussis, which can become whooping cough in babies and tots.)

you gotta decide for yourself and your family, but I just don;t think every parent needs to live in fear of the energency room...my daughter is 13 and has never needed it.

I'm not totally anti-vaccine, jsut have some reservations. I'm studying naturopathy now, FWIW.

judith

i would love a chicken pox party!

"She called me after reading everything and basically said she was appalled at the lack of proof and credibility AND that I was being irresponsible as a parent."

I researched the anti-vaccine websites and in the ones that I have seen there *is* an appalling lack of credibility and proof. I could see how a concerned grandmother could react like that.

I just hope that the children of parents who don't vaccinate don't ever have any curiousity about visiting second or third world countries where dieseases, that aren't very common here, are very common.

this post (by Debs about her mother's response to Deb's vaccine choiuces) is very unsettling to me, but part of what I;m hoping to address in my new career in naturopathic medicine.

the type of public health practice, as well as medical practice, I want to encourage is one that is pluralistic and that recognizes that there will be indivuduals and subgroups in every opulation that for religious, personal, or cultural reasons may make choices that are different from those others make. there are certain issues, especially having to do with chidlren's health, on which the varying campos get SOOO strident and opinionated that the other side is demonized. it;s really sad when it;s within the family. (my mother, who does NOT have a background in health services professionally, went kind of ballistic on me out of fear when I told her I was committed to having the home birthing, at age 38, that she knew I;d been planning for since my teen years...so I understasnd how hard it can be.)

I know that in Claifornia, the laws state clearly that, while there are many required vaccines for school entry and continued registration, that the religious or philosophical exemption is ecognized as legitimate by any school authorities. I do wsh there wre a way of working with people NOT legally involved in these decisions to say, "we recognize that there are risks and benefits to every choice we make...and we accept that living with thge real but often minnor risks of living among people whose health choices may be different than our own is one of the liabilities of living in a free society.

I want people to be free to attend chirch services that may not interest me (or may even anger me), watch TV programs that I wouldn't waste tyen minutes of my life following, choose medical treatments that I have rejected for my own family (overuse of antibiotics and many prescription drugs comes to mind)., have forms of anesthesia available for childborth that I personally find risky and unnecessary, ..and I want the same freedoms of how I choose to help my family live.

I think there might be epidemic situations where universal vaccination is called for. I think in the absense of those critical emergencies, there should be considerable choice and opportunity to inform oneself about the pros and cons of various means of disease prevention for the individual AND in the population view (which is the domain of ;public health.)

anyway...I;ve ahd some serious mother issues myself...I;m, almost 51 and my mother is78, and things have mellowed some but not 100%. what I found helped me when I could keep my compusure enough to make it work was to say, "we've got some very different ideas abou..." (whatever...childbirth, vaccines, vegetarian diewt, TV, whatever your family's trigger topics are) and it probably isn;t going to be productive for us to discuss it further. I;d like it if we could find some common grond.

in recent years, my mother HAS apologized about some of her over-reactions to things that really weren;t her business in the first place...maybe not as much as my wounded ego might like, but hey, learning to "agree to disagree" has its merits in family relationships.

I once read a kind of touching piece by a member of theCHiristian Science Church (I dod a college sociology project comparing CHristian Science with newer, more hoilistic forms of mind-bpdy healing to see how they wree alike and how they differed) and the person writing it had to say, "Christian Science parents love their chidlren as much as any parents love their children."

of course they do...sad that because their religious practice involves reliance on prayer instead of medicine and [physiology for healing,m they have felt the need to defend their love for their children. I'm no Christian Scientist and I LOVE the study of physiology (as long as I don;t have to torture animals to do it) but I am rather awed by these people's ebvotion to the principles they hold dear and the ways that they DO love their children...and most of the time, it works, just as a more secular choice against vaccination generally works all right for most of us.

on the home birth thing, I finally had to tell my mother..."I know you think you're looking out for me and my baby, but you need to understand that I'm making this choice out of good information and good ehart, and I believe that home birth is what's healthiest for me and the baby...so please don;t let your fears try to dictate my life. (ast that p;ointm,I;d been studying midwifery in one form or another since my teen ye ars some twenty years earlier...


I did eventually get the apology, byut not because I asked for it or expected it. I think my mother in old age is realizing that she and I are jsut really different people and always have been. once a year or two later, my mother said in an unrelated phone conversation, "so muyc about you is so foreigh to me!" and I was, mercifully for all, undefgensive enough to say, 'well, what you need to remember is that it;s not foreign to me...it IS me."

if your mom relly loves you, and I sus[ect she does, you two will probably find plenty ofcommon ground. vaccines are not the sum total of a person;s health, anbd definitely not the sum total of a person's life.

Judith

Cool- I hadn't heard there was a Sears book on Vaccines! I'll have to go get it. It sounds very good.

Chris- thanks for digging that up. It's a topic I haven't seen addressed anywhere else, and it's been bugging me.

it's funny that you mentioned this book, becuse i was just in my local barnes & noble, where i saw it in abundance on the shelf. gonna get me one!