TBT: Vaccinating or Not Vaccinating?

All you see lately are posts about how measles spread at Disneyland. Didn’t we get rid of measles? Or the other day when I was reading Facebook posts and one of my friends little boy’s got mumps. Are we in 1826? Why are these diseases spreading when we have ways to keep this from happening. Vaccinations are the talk of the town and for good reason, but what are the reasons behind it?

A dear friend of mine posted this the other day:

“I am in the ER with my 10 month old baby. The doctor says he has mumps (yes. Seriously. Mumps. Like straight out of 1930, Mumps). I could tell you all about how his neck and face are swollen to roughly 3 times their normal size, or how he is deformed, hardly recognizable. I could go on about his temp, which has been up to 104.2 (on Tylenol) or how he can hardly swallow. I could tell you all about what a long night it was, or how hard it is to see your baby cry in pain then proceed to pale, listless, dehydrated to the point that he requires IV fluids. I could tell you all about the medical costs we are incurring here. So many things I could say, but I’ll leave it at this: FREAKING VACCINATE YOURSELVES, PEOPLE. You anti-vaxxers choices affect the whole herd, including my baby, who at 10 months old is too young for his first MMR (they give the first one at 12 months). There is just no reason that my healthy baby should suffer with this disease in 2015.”

Reading this completely broke my heart. I remember when we were pregnant with our son and they asked if we were going to vaccinate him. The doctor explained the reasons to vaccinate to us which I appreciated because I am always interested in knowing why we need to do something. In the back of my mind though I thought we just vaccinated and that it wasn’t a choice. Why would I ever not make sure that my child is protected? I feel like that is what a vaccination is, in the end, a protection from things that we can’t see.

Lets say you find a spider in your child’s room. Are you going to leave it there because it could eat the mosquitoes and other harmful bugs? Or are you going to get rid of it because it could bite your child and that bite could cause your child a lot of pain or even kill them? For me the answer is simple, get rid of the spider. As a matter of fact I will probably kill it.

Now when it comes to things like mumps or measles, these spiders that could get to your child, bite them and cause them a lot of pain or even kill them, why not do something to protect them? That is what a vaccine is going to do.

Recently, there was a measles outbreak in Disneyland. What’s crazy about this to me isn’t that it happened at Disneyland, it’s that it happened. The measles vaccine is actually one of the most effective vaccines in the world. So again, how did this happen?

Wired explained it best:

“If you have a group of 1,000 people concentrated in a small space—like oh, say, hypothetically, an amusement park—about 90 percent of them will be vaccinated (hopefully). One person, maybe someone who contracted measles on a recent trip to the Philippines, moves around, spreading the virus. Measles is crazy contagious, so of the 100 people who aren’t vaccinated, about 90 will get infected. Then, of the 900 people who are vaccinated, 3 percent—27 people—get infected because they don’t have full immunity.

Now the Disneyland numbers—six vaccinated infections out of the 34 cases with known records—start to make more sense. (And considering the 16 million or so visitors the park gets every year, we might reasonably expect that number to go up.) Once vaccination levels dip below 90 or 95 percent, there aren’t enough protected people to keep the disease in check—the herd immunity that epidemiologists like to talk about so much. In the US, we’ve been doing pretty well keeping those numbers up. “But there are some fluctuations,” says Cristina Cassetti, program officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “and if vaccination levels dip down a little, you get a situation like Disneyland.”

One of my cousins told me how our grandma once told her the “younger generation” just hasn’t seen how horrible these diseases are like she had in her life. Now, I guess we get to, ex. Measles outbreak. If there is a known way to stop this from happening I just assume that we would all be on board.

Vaccinating your children is your own decision. I have decided to vaccinate my son and will vaccinate all my children. I do this because I feel that if I can prevent them from suffering rather than assume the vaccination could have negative effects on my child. I don’t want to experience what my grandma had to because with modern medicine and science we have found a cure and should keep it that way. Lets stop those spiders before they sink their teeth into our small children.