Why vaccinating every child matters:
There will always be a certain percentage of people who are not healthy enough to take vaccines because they do have some risky ingredients, primarily the virus itself. An immunocompromised person, such as someone with leukemia, cannot defeat the small amount of virus that a vaccine contains. Infants must wait until they develop more fully to receive their vaccinations. At the levels we've been maintaining vaccinations, these people don't have to live in fear of contracting smallpox or mumps if they step out for groceries, but if enough people are unvaccinated, then their risk of exposure is higher, as is their risk of passing on the disease. In other words, if enough people are vaccinated, their inability to carry the virus smothers new outbreaks before they occur by denying the virus enough hosts to spread itself.
Normally I go by a live-and-let-live code, but the reduction in vaccine rates along the coasts (in some California school districts up to 75% of preschool kids are unvaccinated for non-medical reasons) has created outbreaks of diseases we thought we were done with in the US.
This link is an interactive map of preventable outbreaks that have occurred.
http://www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_Vaccine_Map/#map
If you drag the time filter toward 2014 you'll see that Measles, the disease you decided was important enough to vaccinate against, has been occurring more frequently in the states that have made non-medical vaccine exceptions common. We are effectively moving from the yellow phase in the graphic (when we can, for example, be sure that newborns will not come into contact with measles and become ill before they have a chance to be vaccinated) backwards up to the middle phase, when ONLY the vaccinated people are protected.
Now, in full disclosure I do not take the flu vaccine. I prefer to expose myself to the flu, and the ever-evolving nature of that particular virus makes the vaccine less effective than others. I do not have regular contact with children or the elderly as I live some distance from my family. However, if most of the population became vaccinated (if we moved to the yellow phase in the graphic above), I would probably relent to the social pressure to vaccinate myself to avoid being the vector that sickened vulnerable people who felt they were safe.
In regards to additives, I appreciate your taking info from the CDC, as there are a lot of sensationalist "news" sources out there. However, upon clicking though it appears that each of these ingredients is a trace amount that occurs in the vaccine for good reasons that have been weighed against the side affects. My point is that yes, you do have to make a risk/benefit analysis for your children's vaccines, but I hope when you do that you consider your neighbor's children as well as your own. Your use of the MMR vaccine indicates that you're using some sound decision making.
There will always be a certain percentage of people who are not healthy enough to take vaccines because they do have some risky ingredients, primarily the virus itself. An immunocompromised person, such as someone with leukemia, cannot defeat the small amount of virus that a vaccine contains. Infants must wait until they develop more fully to receive their vaccinations. At the levels we've been maintaining vaccinations, these people don't have to live in fear of contracting smallpox or mumps if they step out for groceries, but if enough people are unvaccinated, then their risk of exposure is higher, as is their risk of passing on the disease. In other words, if enough people are vaccinated, their inability to carry the virus smothers new outbreaks before they occur by denying the virus enough hosts to spread itself.
Normally I go by a live-and-let-live code, but the reduction in vaccine rates along the coasts (in some California school districts up to 75% of preschool kids are unvaccinated for non-medical reasons) has created outbreaks of diseases we thought we were done with in the US.
This link is an interactive map of preventable outbreaks that have occurred.
http://www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_Vaccine_Map/#map
If you drag the time filter toward 2014 you'll see that Measles, the disease you decided was important enough to vaccinate against, has been occurring more frequently in the states that have made non-medical vaccine exceptions common. We are effectively moving from the yellow phase in the graphic (when we can, for example, be sure that newborns will not come into contact with measles and become ill before they have a chance to be vaccinated) backwards up to the middle phase, when ONLY the vaccinated people are protected.
Now, in full disclosure I do not take the flu vaccine. I prefer to expose myself to the flu, and the ever-evolving nature of that particular virus makes the vaccine less effective than others. I do not have regular contact with children or the elderly as I live some distance from my family. However, if most of the population became vaccinated (if we moved to the yellow phase in the graphic above), I would probably relent to the social pressure to vaccinate myself to avoid being the vector that sickened vulnerable people who felt they were safe.
In regards to additives, I appreciate your taking info from the CDC, as there are a lot of sensationalist "news" sources out there. However, upon clicking though it appears that each of these ingredients is a trace amount that occurs in the vaccine for good reasons that have been weighed against the side affects. My point is that yes, you do have to make a risk/benefit analysis for your children's vaccines, but I hope when you do that you consider your neighbor's children as well as your own. Your use of the MMR vaccine indicates that you're using some sound decision making.
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That is one thing I would have never expected to see on this thread. I can understand tetanus, if you actually have reason to suspect that the toxin is in your system, but the rest are rather unnecessary.
