Disease avoidance

Some of the most emotionally charged conflicts in our society revolve around a parent's right to determine what's right for his or her child -- especially when the parent's determination is at variance with both social norms and scientific evidence.  A Jehovah's Witness who refuses a blood transfusion for a child -- because that religion equates a transfusion with the Biblically proscribed ingestion of blood -- even though without the transfusion the child will die, is perhaps the most disturbing example.

A less dire example is the refusal of many parents to have their children inoculated.  Sometimes this refusal is based on religious objections -- objections to the specific substances required in specific vaccinations, or, more commonly in the United States, to a belief that vaccination interferes with divine providence.  (As does wearing seat belts in an automobile, I assume.)  More often, probably, the parent believes that immunizations are either worthless medically, or have possible side effects worse than the disease they are designed to prevent. 

These pseudo-scientific objections are fed by the internet, and by some parents' willingness to believe that mainstream doctors and scientists are for some reason concealing problems that writers of internet blogs accurately bring to light.  This attitude by parents is similar to the attitude of climate change doubters -- why believe university researchers when I've read something different somewhere?  For example, many parents have adopted the belief that some or all immunizations may cause, in some cases, autism -- despite the absence of any medical evidence.

These immunization doubters aren't all wacko conservative gun nuts.  I had a very liberal Facebook "friend" -- I didn't know her in person, but we "met" because we liked each other's comments on the Facebook page of a mutual friend -- who finally defriended me.  Why?  Because, without arguing, I simply told her that I disagreed that flu vaccinations were a scam by "Big Pharm" to make money with a worthless procedure.  We agreed whole-heartedly on virtually every other political issue we discussed, but I guess I had strayed into unforgiveable heresy in her eyes.

These ruminations result from two events.  First, I've been reading the newspaper stories this week about the boy in Ohio whose mother doesn't believe in immunization.  Through his teens, he had read all the scientific evidence, pro and con, and had discussed the matter with his mother repeatedly.  When he turned 18 (and in Ohio no longer needed parental consent), his first adult act was to begin receiving all those immunizations he'd never had.  He now worries about his six younger unimmunized siblings.

And secondly, today I take the first oral dose of live typhoid vaccine, in preparation for the perils of India.  I've had both the injectable inactive vaccine, and the oral live vaccine in the past.  Never had any problems with the oral method -- one pill taken every other day for a total of four doses.  (The injectable vaccine gave me bad flu-like symptoms for a day, but that may have been because of no prior immunity.)

If I die of typhoid even before arriving in India, or if I develop adult-onset autism, well then.  They told us so, right?  I love irony as much as you do.  You can put this blog post in your file under "Idiot."