oh, mighty internet oracle

[the_siobhan]

Just out of curiosity, why would somebody be "anti vaccination".

Or is it short form for something?

Comments

[excess-and-oohs.livejournal.com]

not really up for being attacked right now, so i'll opt out. sorry :(

[pfrank.livejournal.com]

There's some (not sure if it's real conclusive or not) evidence linking vaccinations to autism. Something about mercury in the shots, and what not.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

This is the only thing I can think of, yep.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

They haven't put mercury in vaccines for years. Not in Canada, anyway.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

From what I've read, what's happening is that autism is being diagnosed far more than it used to be, thanks to increased awareness and education.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not only is it not conclusive, but it's been proven to be a fraud.

There is no link between vaccinations and autism. There is only a link between insufficient herd protection and plague.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I just yesterday saw an article that they've conclusively disproven the link, as autism diagnosis rates in CA continued to increase even after the mercury was removed from the vaccines. The article posited (and I tend to agree) that a lot of the seeming increase in autism is actually just better awareness and wider definitions.

[shara.livejournal.com]

There's some word that vaccinations of some kind can lead to/cause other disorders. That's all I can tell of it so far, though.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I kind of wonder if they really mean no vaccines ever, what do they use as a prophylactic instead? Do they just depend on the fact that the rest of the population is vaccinated?

[divine.livejournal.com]

You mean in terms of giving children their shots? Or pets?
(I might not have time to answer this before I go to work, but i'll surely reply later)

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

It was referring to children.

I just thought it was an odd thing to be against, so I wondered what the logic behind it is.

[machineplay.livejournal.com]

in addition to the above, some people feel like vaccinations in general are all part of a scam by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and that the drop in diseases addressed by vaccinations is actually due to natural trends in disease cycles and better health care. it's something that time will have to prove.

i opted not to get my daughter any newer vaccinations and had her vaccinated with the old school separate vaccines for infants because of a family history of debilitating reactions. she hasn't had any of the 'teenager' vaccines by her own choice. she'll get them when she's ready to; again the family history of severe reactions (on both sides) is an issue.

i'd be willing to take my chances on things like the developing rotavirus and influenza vaccines, though. no one in our family gets flu shots right now -- two don't need them and i can't have them, and they're just too shot-in-the-dark to make it worthwhile.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

in addition to the above, some people feel like vaccinations in general are all part of a scam by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and that the drop in diseases addressed by vaccinations is actually due to natural trends in disease cycles and better health care. it's something that time will have to prove.

I imagine if enough people opt out we'll see that trend reverse itself.

Actually when I think about it I'm sure that there have been outbreaks of things like polio in populations in the US that don't vaccinate for religious reasons.

i opted not to get my daughter any newer vaccinations and had her vaccinated with the old school separate vaccines for infants because of a family history of debilitating reactions.

That makes sense. Are the seperate vaccines still readily available?

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

The science has moved on, but the scare keeps on going.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/health/08autism.html?ref=us

Autism cases in California continued to climb even after a mercury-based vaccine preservative that some people blame for the neurological disorder was removed from routine childhood shots, a study has found...

The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.

[shillolo.livejournal.com]

Assuming you mean childhood vac's and beyond the above mentioned, in particular order:

1. They haven't all been around for the duration of a lifecycle, eg. the chickpox vax and the new herpes vax, hence how it affects, say, reproductive organs not yet developed.

2. Some people have abnormal reactions to disease (again, myself - I contracted chickenpox 3 times, and whooping cough despite being vax'd)

That said I've been selective, and delayed, and currently undecided on some vax - not anti, and have one of the most pro-vax peds around - so can or worms and all - there is my stand.

Additionally some are just ridiculous, there is research being done a 'dirt' vax as children have such a limited exposure to it with all the over cleaning (hand sanitizer etc.) that immune systems fail at exposure to regular life.

[shillolo.livejournal.com]

* in NO particular order

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

My non-PC take on it is that it's easy to be anti-vaccination when you live in a First World country. As M pointed out, if person A chooses not to vaccinate their child, it's unlikely that the child will catch anything because most of the people the child comes into contact with ARE vaccinated. Even that isn't a guarantee - my mother is an emergency room nurse and she caught TB about 10 years ago. She was quarantined when she was first diagnosed and remained off work for several weeks. Everyone in our immediate family had to get tested for it.

One of my cousins is a pediatric nurse and has worked in underdeveloped countries where she saw children dying from illnesses that are preventable by vaccines. She still talks about the morning when she had to comfort a woman whose baby had died in her arms. She came back appalled that anyone would choose not to vaccinate their children.

If I look at my own family, I can see clear evidence of how damaging a lack of vaccines can be. My second cousin had polio as a child and was disabled for the rest of his life. My grandmother had smallpox as a child. My sister had a very bad case of whooping cough when she was a baby. I still remember the day that she stopped breathing and my father running into the street yelling for someone to call a ambulance.

Should parents research vaccines and have a say in when their child gets certain vaccines? Of course. But to opt out entirely? I don't understand it.

*dons flame retardant suit*

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm old enough to have gone to school with kids who were permanently disabled by polio. Some of them had lost siblings to the disease.

Maybe that's part of my bias.

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

I'm against *requiring* vaccinations, since I think every parent should have the right to decide for themselves.
Every vaccine involves pain and risk to the child.
Vaccination is an interesting social experiment.
For example, the polio vaccine:
I believe they've completely stopped giving the live vaccine now, but when they were, for many years, polio had been all but eliminated from the population, and the *only* cases of polio were ones that occurred *as a result of the vaccine*.
As long as most children continued getting the vaccine, any individual child was at much higher risk if they got the vaccine than if they didn't.
If a few parents decided to exclude their children from that risk, there was no harm done to the population, and those children benefitted.
But if *too many* parents did that, then the whole population would be at risk.
So as a parent, given that *your* child is at higher risk if they get the vaccine, and at virtually zero risk if they don't... and given that most parents *do* vaccinate their children... do you subject your child to "their share" of the risk, on some kind of principal, or do you keep your child safe from that?

I had my kids vaccinated, but I delayed them a few months, as I don't think babies should need to be dealing with those stresses quite so young. And I delayed the chicken pox vaccine for my youngest (it wasn't around when my older kids were that age) until she was nearly school age and it was clear she wasn't going to catch chicken pox as a young child (when it would have been *probably* mild and given better immunity than the immunization). I'm still dubious about this one, as it still hasn't been in use long enough for us to know what the results are... it seems to give only partial immunity and only for a limited time, so we may just wind up with a population that gets a more nasty version of the disease because they get it later.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, vaccines here are only compulsory for the child to attend public school. I think that's fair since the health of the other children also needs to be considered.

I used to work with polio, and from what I can vaguely remember the live virus is a lot better at conferring immunity. At that time the initial vaccination was done with the killed virus, but the live one was used for boosters.

I remember at the time (early 90's?) there was a small breakout of polio in the US. They started using live virus for the initial immunization because they let themselves run out of the killed version. Most of the people who contracted the disease were adults from countries that did not have vaccination programs. They had no immunity and picked it up because the babies were shedding live virus in their diapers.

[http://users.livejournal.com/belladonna_/]

There was a Lancet (I think) article written sometime in the late 90s, signed by about 13 British scientists, 10 of the 13 scientists publicly retracted their findings (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/science/04AUTI.html?ei=5007&en=b5629e239346e042&ex=1393736400&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=all&position=), the twelfth wasn't available for comment and the thirteenth was found to have been serving as an expert witness for a family suing the British government for a vaccination "causing" autism in their child whilst participating in the study.

So really, the "science" this finding was based on was totally bogue, but you can't tell some people that. You can only pray that their kid doesn't give yours a deadly childhood illness.

It's actually become something of an issue - the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have an initiative re-educating people about why it's good to vaccinate your kids (maybe next they'll have to tackle indoor plumbing? :) ) and there's some concern that serious illnesses will be re-introduced into the population if enough people abstain from vaccination.

A lot of people agree that a better understanding of autism and a widening of the criteria for a diagnosis coupled with more refined diagnostic tools are responsible for the rise in autism.

[victorianrose23.livejournal.com]

I'm not anti-vx, I just don't agree with overloading a child's system by giving them 3 or 4 shots at a time. I've spread Sebastian's out and he's "behind" by about 6 shots, but I don't really care. It's more important to me to not risk having him have a reaction because he had too many things pumped into his system at once.

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

Some vaccines are "non-vegan" because they use chicken eggs to create the vaccine. This is a prime reason some people forgo the flu vaccine. Even non-vegans sometimes prefer to avoid this.

I'm very uncomfortable with the general wisdom of vaccines, on many levels. I accept, for example, that we vaccinate against truly terrible diseases which no individual would want to suffer, but I am less sure that preventing said diseases is necessarily all that good for the population at large. Additionally, I've done some research into the methods of vaccine creation, and I do not at all trust the unintended consequences that may occur as a result.

A prime example is the OPV/HIV hypothesis. Let me first note that I do not hold an opinion on this hypothesis as a reality, as I have neither the information nor the medical background to really be able to parse the information that I can find. However, what I DO find is compelling reason to believe that even if there's no HIV/OPV connection, we dodged a bullet in that case. Sadly, the medical and scientific community has not handled their position on this situation very well, which I don't feel does them any favors. (See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis and http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/)

I'm not saying, "HIV could have been spread by the Polio vaccine, therefore it WAS." I am saying, "The evidence that, and method of how, HIV could have been spread by the Polio vaccine, while inconclusive, is strong enough that we should take a hard look at how vaccines are created to determine that something like that never does happen."

On a personal note, my mother and an aunt had polio, the latter badly crippled by it, while my brother died of AIDS. I cannot refute a certain amount of sadness to think that there could be a connection. We will never know, and it's water under the bridge.

This is probably somewhere in the low 80s on my List Of Why I Don't Have Children. Which is to say, my holding these views has little impact on the world, since I don't have any kids I'm refusing to vaccinate, and I don't go around spreading my opinions about it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible there is a connection. When I was making polio vaccine the virus was grown on green monkey cells and they are known to carry an AIDS-like virus.

It's since been moved to a continuous human cell line.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Anti-scientific narcissistic wankery always makes people feel smart.

[reddragdiva]

You are a genius.

[disastrid.livejournal.com]

many people don't vaccinate their children because mercury was/is sometimes used as a preserving agent in vaccines. it has been hypothesized (and extensively argued, proven, disproven, etc) that autism is a result of neurotoxicity caused by a genetic predisposition to one's body being less efficient at processing and getting rid of heavy metals, and therefore heavy metals that enter the system have serious adverse effects. although mercury may not have been used for years, i can understand completely why some people are wary of or refusing to vaccinate their children against diseases they will probably not get to minimize risk. vaccinations are also lots more common now than they were even twenty years ago - kids used to be vaccinated against tetanus, mumps, whooping cough and the like; now added to the mix there's chicken pox, HPV, hepatitis, and so on. the conventional wisdom used to be that diseases that breed immunity - measles and chicken pox are good examples, they probably won't kill you and you'll likely be immune forever if you do get them - weren't worth vaccinating against. i remember my father talking about how every kid his age got The Three (chicken pox, measles, mumps) by the time they were twelve and it wasn't a big deal because at least you didn't have polio (he grew up in hamilton where polio was a major problem and lots of kids died and no one knew how to prevent polio and what to do and there was a major sense of panic; in his school pictures there are several kids with braces on their legs from polio and those are the ones that managed to live).

that said, in this time and context, we don't have preventable diseases killing off children in the thousands so we're in a position to debate things like this. polio and smallpox are nearly off the map, measles (though making a comeback, i sure as hell had it!) is still relatively rare, and mumps is now a standard vaccinated disease. every disease can have serious complications and every parent wants to protect their children, so it's natural that a) parents would want to vaccinate, and b) pharmaceutical companies would see a market gap with something like chicken pox and develop a vaccine for everything possible. (not saying that parents are easily led sheep and all pharmaceutical companies are extreme evil, it's just simply supply vs demand.) at the end of the day, i think a lot of it is up to personal choice and parents doing what they think is best for their kids. i'm not a pathologist and if kids aren't vaccinated for legitimate parental reasons i wouldn't try to convince anyone otherwise; similarly if a kid is vaccinated against everything up to and including hysterical pregnancy i wouldn't cast any judgements either.

[reddragdiva]

We happen to live in Walthamstow, which has lots of immigrants from countries that don't have a good vaccine regimen. So TB and measles, for example, are known to be circulating locally. This makes vaccination an EXCELLENT idea.

[reddragdiva]

Irresponsible hippy shit for the most part.

This is different from specific cautions, e.g. arkady's eldest daughter had an allergic reaction to the egg base of a vaccine, so we have due caution re: Freda. We're also aware the precise timing of vaccinations recommended by the NHS is mostly to make damn sure the kids are vaccinated at all, rather than being the manufacturer-recommended cycle, so we're spacing them out further. Etc., etc.

But in general, vaccines are much less risky than the disease itself, and we also live in an area with lots of immigrants from places that don't have a good vaccine regimen, and we know that e.g. TB and measles are currently circulating. So I'm a big fan of making damn sure Freda's vaccinated against everything relevant.

[ashbet]

One thing I've read is that the age that the dramatic behavior changes in an autistic child normally manifest right around the time that many vaccines are given, so parents couldn't help but see a potential causal connection -- "My child was fine until s/he got this vaccine, then s/he had a fever for a week, and a month later, s/he started exhibiting behavior patterns that turned out to be autism." The fact that the behavior changes would have occurred ANYWAY is less comforting than the idea that something has to be to *blame*.

I have a good friend whose wife is hysterically anti-vaccination, and I have to bite my tongue every time I have a parenting conversation with her (she's a raging hippie, and she considers some of MY parenting methods to be barbarous, despite the fact that I have a happy, well-adjusted, beautifully-behaved teenager, whereas she has three whiny, clingy, poorly-adjusted kids, one of whom seems to have autistic tendencies anyway. OMG!) To be fair, her sister was autistic and had CP, and died at age 22 after having a virtually vegetable-like life, so I can see why she's so insistent on keeping her kids from any *possibility* of danger . . . OTOH, I think she's gone too far in the other direction.

I'm debating whether to get Kira the HPV vaccine, but that's only because it's so new and I'm concerned that they might discover in 10 years that it was a bad idea in the first place :/

*wibbles*

-- A <3

[ravensee.livejournal.com]

As a mom who has had her kids vaccinated (I thought Alex hadn't had hers, but it turns out she has and I went ahead and got them updated anyways on Monday per school regulations) and they both have Autism, I can say three things:

1. My children, from my own beliefs as their caregiver and someone who sees them 24/7, that they specifically did not get Autism from their vaccines.

2. BUT (and this is a strong BUT), it doesn't mean other children who have Autism, didn't.

I stand by parents on both sides of the issue because each Autistic (like every other individual who has any condition, illness or disease) is different and should be looked at differently as an individual with a multi-faceted body that matches no other, therefore treatment should also be unique, especially with Autism.



Oddly enough I did happen to read this article today:


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_01/012857.php

As for the chicken pox vaccine....I choose not to give it. It's too new and not enough research has been done. We'll do it the old fashion way.

[ravensee.livejournal.com]

I also don't think dismissing people who are desperately looking for a reason for their children's condition (because no one is listening to them) is constructive either. On the other hand science really doesn't know what to do with emotions anyways. On the gripping hand, only medical scientists (autistics or not, who have polio or not) who are parents (of autistics or not, who have polio or not) can really argue this issue with more fact and tact.

[individuation.livejournal.com]

There was a case in the States where a Jewish couple claimed that it was against their religion to vaccinate their children. The local school would not admit them without the vaccinations. When they went to court they brought in rabbis and other scholars of Judaism to say that NO WHERE in Judaism does it say that vaccinations are prohibited, but because the family could prove a long history of this belief, the court decided that no matter how unfounded, it was a true religious belief of the family and because of the church/state separation the family would not have to vaccinate their children to send them to school.

Interesting stuff!

On a practical note, if everyone around you is vaccinated - you don't really need to be. So if a few kids in a school are not vaccinated, chances are that they'll be okay.

Yeah, that totally didn't answer your question.
I'll shut up over here.
ps: dig the facial hair :)

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's also the theory that we're actually *weakening* our population by taking diseases out of circulation, and that eventually, the result will be a plague that will wipe us all out, because we won't have built up the ability to resist it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, 'cause what's really troubling this planet is a shortage of life-threatening diseases.

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy#Arguments_against_widespread_vaccination