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I think YOU should take a good look at history..you might be surprised and maybe not so quick to mock the misfortunes of others..Smallpox actually increased after vaccinations began.Hundred of thousands of people died from this disease...records show 90% of cases occured AFTER the individual was vaccinated...Many countries saw what was happening and refused vaccination....When Austrailia ended compulsory vaccination, the disease virtually disapeared..When England finally rejected vaccination, the disease decreased significantly....Jenners vaccinations were followed by so much disease and death that they were deemed dangerous, and deadly. smallpox reached it's maximum mortality AFTER vaccination was introduced. Today, after mass vacinations, cancer has more than tripled in our populations....cancers were almost unheard of in children.....not anymore.
Smallpox increased? How many cases were there last year???
As I said, vaccinations are not perfect. They just beat the alternative by a mile. Diseases that used to kill children regularly are now rare occurances thanks to vaccinations.
In what age group have cancers increased? Ans: older americans. Many of whom would never have lived to get cancer if they'd died of childhood illnesses. We are living longer than ever. Cancers are cells gone amok. Live long enough and you increase your chances of getting cancer. My husband's doctor claims that age causes prostrate cancer.
You're latching on to one thing and running with it when many things have changed in society from the foods we eat to how much we exercise. Just living longer means we'll have more age related illnesses. People are living longer, in part, due to vaccinations.
Please tell me what you think the world would look like today if we had no vaccines. Do you really think our children wouldn't be dying of childhood illness as they have in the past? They are spared because of that. Did some people pay a price as vaccines were perfected? I'm sure they did but that is true of most medical breakthroughs.
hat survivors of the disease were immune for the rest of their lives. This led to the practice of variolation - a process of exposing a healthy person to infected material from a person with smallpox in the hopes of producing a mild disease that provided immunity from further infection. The first written account of variolation describes a Buddhist nun practicing around 1022 to 1063 AD. She would grind up scabs taken from a person infected with smallpox into a powder, and then blow it into the nostrils of a non-immune person. By the 1700's, this method of variolation was common practice in China, India, and Turkey. In the late 1700's European physicians used this and other methods of variolation, but reported "devastating" results in some cases. Overall, 2% to 3% of people who were variolated died of smallpox, but this practice decreased the total number of smallpox fatalities by 10-fold.
The next step towards the eradication of smallpox occurred with the observation by English physician, Edward Jenner, that milkmaids who developed cowpox, a less serious disease, did not develop the deadly smallpox. In 1796, Jenner took the fluid from a cowpox pustule on a dairymaid's hand and inoculated an 8-year-old boy. Six weeks later, he exposed the boy to smallpox, and the boy did not develop any symptoms. Jenner coined the term "vaccine" from the word "vaca" which means "cow" in Latin. His work was initially criticized, but soon was rapidly accepted and adopted. By 1800 about 100,000 people had been vaccinated worldwide.
The "modern" vaccine that was licensed by the FDA was taken from a weak strain of virus called the New York City Board of Health strain. It was produced by Wyeth Laboratories and licensed under the name Dryvax. The last outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in Texas in 1949 with 8 cases and 1 death. Even though most of North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand were free of smallpox by this time, other countries such as Africa and India continued to suffer from epidemics.
In 1967 the World Health Organization (WHO) started a worldwide campaign to eradicate smallpox. This goal was accomplished in 10 years due in a large part to massive vaccination efforts. The last endemic case of smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox.
All coincidence, I'm sure
the UK started using the Smallpox vaccine in 1853. They stopped because the vaccine was no longer needed, not because they "rejected" vaccination.
The main reason cancers have increased since the start of vaccinations is because people aren't dying of those diseases anymore. Instead they get older, and the older you get, the more likely you are to get cancer
Why should I, as soon as you see that they're not cdc, or who, I'm sure you'll dismiss them before you even read them....
What major hospitals have done studies? IF vaccines are so bad, I'm sure there's someone out there, reputable, who has done studies.
Your problem is that the most reputable sources, in Ameraca and elsewhere, stand, solidly, behind the practice of vaccination to the point they don't even question it's benefits to society and individuals.
Many of the diseases that we vaccinate for our caused by viruses and antibiotics are useless against them. You can't cure a case of polio with antibiotics or a case of the flu.
The other serious flaw in your reasoning is the assumption that antibiotics will always be there for us. Sadly, this may not be true. Overuse of antibiotics is creating powerful bacteria that are gradually becoming resistant to antibiotics. In the future, mankind may lose the ability to treat any number diseases in this fashion.
It makes prevention of those diseases all the more critical and diseases can only be prevented through vaccination.
Prevention of disease--through scientifically established means--will always be a better alternative to trying to treat disease after it has occurred.
The assumption is yours....not mine, I'm very aware that the incorrect and over use of antibiotics is creating super bugs resistant to most antibiotics. I also believe that the same thing is happening with vaccines, as there are incidences of fully vaccinated children coming down with a new strain of pertussis that vaccines don't prevent.
Should parents who refuse to vaccinate their children be forced to pay higher health care costs because they are putting their children at unnecessary risk?
Refusing to vaccinate a child is dangerous not just for that child but for entire communities. It's precisely this point a colleague of mine was considering when he had the idea that parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids should pay substantially higher health insurance premiums.
It makes sense. Insurance, after all, is just a pool of money into which we all pay. In determining how much we or our employers pay, risk is taken into account.
The perfect analogy is smoking. If you smoke -- and want to turn your lungs black and spend a greater portion of that pot of money on your possible chronic lung disease or any cancers you'll get -- then you may have to pay more.
Why shouldn't we impose the same logic on parents who refuse to vaccinate their children?
So if 20 years down the road it's common knowledge that vaccines "were" dangerous, do I get a refund because I didn't vaccinate? If my child is damaged by a vaccine, am I guaranteed compensation? Vaccination is still a very controversial issue, we can't penalize people just because they have differences of opinion.
So if 20 years down the road it's common knowledge that vaccines "were" dangerous, do I get a refund because I didn't vaccinate? If my child is damaged by a vaccine, am I guaranteed compensation? Vaccination is still a very controversial issue, we can't penalize people just because they have differences of opinion.
No. Because it will not turn out that vaccinating was more dangerous than not vaccinating. We already know that because a much higher percentage of children live to be adults these days. Childhood illnesses like polio are almost non existent these days. Small pox is unheard of. Are there risks in any medical procedure? Sure but the risks are far outweighed by the benefits to individuals who attain immunity and society when diseases become rare due to vaccination.
Unfortunately, when we do have an epidemic, we'll have the anti vaccers to blame and they should pay dearly for putting all of society at risk. You risk not only your children but mine too. Vaccines are not 100% so some segment of the vaccinated population is unprotected. Unfortunately, our kids go down with yours. You asked for it. We didn't. What gives you the right to risk my children?
Out of curiosity (I'm going to regret asking, aren't I, lol), what do you see wrong with vaccination. What horrible thing worse than say paralysis due to polio or death due to small pox do you see in vaccinations? What percentage of children are paralyzed or killed by vaccinations? And can you tell me they wouldn't have been killed by the diseases they were vaccinated against? Do you really believe more lives have been taken by using vaccines than have been saved by using vaccines?
Seriously, if we eliminated all medical procedures that have any risk, we'd have to eliminate them all. The question isn't is there risk but does the benefit outweigh the risks and, in the case of vaccination, it clearly does. Please prove that vaccinations are worse than the diseases they prevent. Worse than a high percentage of kids getting polio and becomming paralyzed or getting small pox and dying. I've never known anyone who had small pox and I was in one of the first groups to be mass immunized (they lined us up at school and administered the vaccines via sugar cubes). I have a scar on my arm and one on my leg from my small pox vaccine (I picked at the scar and was sitting cross legged and bled onto my knee so I have a scar there too) and I don't know these diseases because they were all but irradicated in my lifetime by vaccines. If there were anything awful enough to offset that, we'd know about it.
Vaccines are safer than the alternative. That's all that matters. If we can make them safer, we should but we should not stop using them because there are risks anymore than we should stop doing appendectomies because there is risk. There will always be risks to medical procedures. The question isn't is there risk, it's do the benefits outweigh the risks and they, clearly, do in the case of vaccination.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 04-20-2011 at 07:35 PM..
Why is it my problem? Science, clearly, stands behind vaccination. It doesn't take half a brain to see that our children are far better off vaccinated than children were before vaccinations. That society is better off with vaccinations. I don't have a problem. The two biggest medical organizations in the world stand behind vaccination. Numerous studies support their safety. I can see that children don't die of small pox anymore, that pregnant women don't deliver deaf babies because of exposure to measles anymore, that children are not paralyzed by polio anymore. You have yet to come up with anything negative about vaccines that is anywhere near on the magnitude of the problems we had before they came into common use.
It's your problem. My problem is anti vaccers risking everything for nothing. Unfortunately, when the epidemic that will happen when enough children are not vaccinated happens, those children who did not attain immunity through their vaccinations go down to. Do you really think bringing back small pox or polio or measles would be a good thing????
Why is it my problem? Science, clearly, stands behind vaccination. It doesn't take half a brain to see that our children are far better off vaccinated than children were before vaccinations. That society is better off with vaccinations. I don't have a problem. The two biggest medical organizations in the world stand behind vaccination. Numerous studies support their safety. I can see that children don't die of small pox anymore, that pregnant women don't deliver deaf babies because of exposure to measles anymore, that children are not paralyzed by polio anymore. You have yet to come up with anything negative about vaccines that is anywhere near on the magnitude of the problems we had before they came into common use.
It's your problem. I don't have one.
The irony is the main reason that poster can leave her kids unvaccinated and have them still be low risk for diseases is because the rest of of ARE vaccinated. It might be a little harder to argue about vaccinations if there were annual smallpox and polio epidemics
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