I shouldn't be replying to this because I don't have the scientific data you're asking for, only my own general knowledge and being the offspring of a father whose PhD was on bacterial infections and drug resistance, and the daughter-in-law of a GP. But I feel very strongly about it.
I live in a country with no smallpox, polio, diphtheria or tetanus; with no HIB or meningitis C in under-14s. I don't think that that is a coincidence.
I'm totally happy for my immunised children to be around the unimmunised, but the parents of immune-compromised children may not be. For me, I'm glad that my children contribute to the group immunity that protects the rest.
I don't think we can imagine now what it was like in the days when polio swept cities every summer, and there were outbreaks of diphtheria. My home town had a polio outbreak a couple of years before I was born (1958, m'an oldie!) and my first primary school had a dozen or so children who wore callipers. According to my mother, about sixteen children died in the town - they were born just too early for the Salk vaccine which was introduced in 1955. /rant(hope that doesn't have some obscure real meaning in HTML!)
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Date: 2008-05-17 10:31 am (UTC)I shouldn't be replying to this because I don't have the scientific data you're asking for, only my own general knowledge and being the offspring of a father whose PhD was on bacterial infections and drug resistance, and the daughter-in-law of a GP. But I feel very strongly about it.
I live in a country with no smallpox, polio, diphtheria or tetanus; with no HIB or meningitis C in under-14s. I don't think that that is a coincidence.
I'm totally happy for my immunised children to be around the unimmunised, but the parents of immune-compromised children may not be. For me, I'm glad that my children contribute to the group immunity that protects the rest.
I don't think we can imagine now what it was like in the days when polio swept cities every summer, and there were outbreaks of diphtheria. My home town had a polio outbreak a couple of years before I was born (1958, m'an oldie!) and my first primary school had a dozen or so children who wore callipers. According to my mother, about sixteen children died in the town - they were born just too early for the Salk vaccine which was introduced in 1955.
/rant(hope that doesn't have some obscure real meaning in HTML!)