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I'm not for forced immunizations. Instead, I'm for making immunizations required for particular things.

Want to go to college? Then get a meningitis vaccine.

Want to play on the high school football team? Best get yourself a shot of MMR.

It's my personal opinion that children should be entitled to the best possible life, regardless of what their parents inane beliefs may or may not be. Also, why the hell did this debate just surface? My mom's not even 50 and she vividly remembers standing in line at school to get a polio shot. And consequently we've effectively eliminated polio from the planet. Seems like forced immunizations are a good idea to me.

Everything we do as a society has unforeseen consequences. The problem is that we live in a time where nobody is willing to believe that anything is really unforeseen. So when it turns out that there might be risks in getting vaccinated against diseases that could very well kill you, the first reaction is that there must be a vast conspiracy behind vaccinations. Nevermind that in many cases the risks of NOT vaccinating large portions of the populace against certain diseases would result in much worse consequences than anything the conspiracy theorists could cook up.

That's not to say that I think we should all be vaccinated against anything and everything that could possibly make us sick. I certainly have no intention of getting the H1N1 vaccine. I don't see how the personal benefit outweighs the personal risk on that one. I don't even get the regular flu shots.

pandora114 posted:

Ok, as a parent with a child who has a mild form of autism, I'll come out here.

Mercury is baaad mmmkay? I'm not talking about Freddy Mercury here, I'm talking about that silvery liquid metal type stuff. They put that in your vaccine, then they inject it in your body and into your teeth. My child may or may not be vaccine damaged due to this, I'll never ever know. The fact my child already not neurotypical, I really don't want to cause her any more problems by getting her yet ANOTHER Thimrosal laced vaccine.

Why is Autism rising? We already have enough toxins coursing through our blood due to non controlable environmental factors. NOW, if they could just make ALL Vaccines Thimrosal and formaldehyde free, I'd be more eager to get them. They need to come up with more natural, body friendly preservatives.

Don't take this as insensitivity, but there's no scientific evidence linking autism to vaccination, and even if there was, the probability of developing autism is immeasurably dwarfed by the probability of contracting a debilitating or deadly disease should you spurn vaccination.

The reason why autism is on the rise is actually quite simple: we're learning more about it. It has only been on the books for a few decades now, and we still know very little about the various autistic disorders, and that makes them very hard to diagnose. As we learn more, we will be better equipped to recognize the disorder. This is basic mathematics.

I do agree that they need to get thimerosal (mercury) out of vaccines. Many vaccines that used to use it don't use it any more - so it's high time they got it out of the rest of them. The reason they removed it from many infant and childhood vaccine is kids were receiving significantly more than the government permitted exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin) from all the cumulative vaccinations they were getting as babies, toddlers, and kids.

As far as I'm aware it's only the adult vaccines that still contain thimerosal, since the adult body is a much larger volume of tissue and the thimerosal is more diluted in the system. The flu shot, for instance, still has it. No level of mercury exposure is guaranteed safe, so get rid of it. Just don't replace it with something even worse, ok? I hate it when that happens. Of course, we're talking about mercury here, so the likelihood of the replacement immune stimulant being worse than that seems slim!

Many things that people vaccinate for are lethal or "usually" lethal (50% chance of death or greater) such as tetanus. Unless you're suicidal, there's no real reason to avoid vaccinations for lethal or chronic diseases, especially if they don't contain thimerosal.

I don't give my horse the flu or rhino shots as those diseases are rarely lethal. She just gets vaccinated for the two worst killers: tetanus, and rabies. Most people vaccinate their horses for flu and rhino but it's not necessary in my case, especially when you do a cost benefit analysis of an expensive vaccination being given to a horse used for leisure purposes only. I can deal with given her two weeks off to recover from a slight cough and runny nose. Perhaps a racehorse missing out on high-stakes races with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake cannot. It all depends on the individual circumstance with people and with animals. Generally, though, you've got to be pretty daft to avoid vaccinations for the lethal, chronic, or disfiguring diseases.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/18/2009 07:43PM by pragmatica.

Great. Yeah, formaldehyde has no safe level of exposure either. In its gaseous form it's also the root cause of sick building syndrome (which I had for four months after they renovated the workplace a few years ago and the particleboard furniture was offgassing heavily - my lungs would fill up with fluid, I'd be wheezing at my desk, the whites of my eyes went beet red and swelled up like marshmallows as soon as I entered the office building - it was horrific). Do all, most, or just some vaccines contain it?

In the end though it's still better to get a little exposure to these things than to "get dead" from a disease with a 50% or greater mortality rate, like tetanus.

pandora114 posted:

I'll accept that Riktor, but face it, Mercury and Formaldehyde are really NOT GOOD THINGS, true? I personally don't like anymore toxins in my body than absolutely neccisary. And let's face it, We CANT avoid most environmental toxins. That is my biggest issue with vaccinations. The preservatives, are TOXIC. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. Mercury is a known neurotoxin. If Vaccine makers can figure out how to make a non toxic preservative for vaccines, at a cost effective way, so they can eliminate the toxins, then hey, it's awesome. I totally totally am behind the THEORY of vaccination. I understand it, and I really encourage it. I just wish they would stop using deadly neurotoxins and carcinogens to preserve them.

As I understand it, these chemicals are found in trace amounts. You're just as likely to ingest trace amounts of toxins by drinking tap water. So again, I'm going to have to fall back on statistics here. You're far likelier to die from the illness the vaccination prevents than to acquire a debilitating disorder from the trace toxins found in the vaccine.

Sure, mercury is bad, but I certainly don't think this is a case of evil scientists twisting their mustaches and laughing maniacally as they deliberately poison practically everyone in the first world. I'd like to read up on the science of vaccine development before I start making judgments on what the recipe should be

pandora114 posted:

My child may or may not be vaccine damaged due to this, I'll never ever know.

Its important to know the origin of the rumors that certain immunizations cause autism. It was a small paper studying only 12 children with autism published in the Lancet, and the paper actually concluded "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described". However the author of the paper later spoke somewhere and said getting the 3 vaccines at different times may be better than getting them all at once. And that was it. Im not making it up. That was the causes of all this hysteria. It started in Great Britain (where at least one kid has died from the measles so far because he wasnt vaccinated) and eventually made its way to the US.


That aside, looking at the physiology of the disease, it seems implausible that it could be caused by mercury. Its a sophisticated disease, but mercury is a highly reactive toxin. its unlikely it could cause a disease so....organized.

And after all, we know what happens when people are exposed to mercury. They dont get autism.



As for toxins...im very split on this issue. I think there are way too many harmful chemicals that we are exposed to everyday. carcinogens and harmful toxins are everywhere...in the air, in shampoo...endocrine disruptors are in soaps and cleaning products...

but...what can you do? avoid them? good luck. Theres so many products that have in them carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins-or at least uses them as an intermediary- you would have to live in isolation to avoid them. tthe good news is that its a lot more dangerous to the people making them than people using them. you are exposed to such small concentrations it doesnt even matter. Its as many toxicologists say: "the dose makes the poison". to be fair, when theres a lot of tiny concentrations added together the risk is increased, and perhaps that is part of the reason for rising cancer rates. but is it really necessary to try to avoid one specific compound, like formaldehyde? I find it funny when people refuse to drink diet cola based on an unsubstantiated myth, yet they drink decaffeinated coffee. In case you dont know, you decaffeinate something (ie coffee, tea) by heating it and washing it with dichloromethane, which is a solvent that "washes out" the caffeine. You can separate the now decaf coffee from the solvent because they have different densities. The funny part to this story is that dichloromethane is a known carcinogen. People spend so much energy avoiding something that probably isnt harmful yet in some other area of their life they probably are unknowningly exposing themself to something that actually is harmful. So whats the point? why bother? Its just like germ freaks who constantly wash their hands but dont realize that they are breathing in 1,000s of bacteria every second.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2009 06:20PM by FuzzyDunlop.

Everyone here is making good points.

I need some credible articles both for and against this topic.
Can anyone help?

I just feel like some vaccines are too new and we don't know the long term effects of everything. People don't do enough research on what is actually going into their or their children's bodies when they get vaccinated.

heatherette333 posted:

I just feel like some vaccines are too new and we don't know the long term effects of everything. People don't do enough research on what is actually going into their or their children's bodies when they get vaccinated.

There's no way to tell the "long term effects of everything". There are too many variables.

Simple statistics: most people have been vaccinated, and life expectancy is in the 70s. Compare that to the third world, where most are not vaccinated, and life expectancy is somewhere in the 40s and 50s.

.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2012 03:44PM by jd84.

Riktor posted:

heatherette333 posted:

I just feel like some vaccines are too new and we don't know the long term effects of everything. People don't do enough research on what is actually going into their or their children's bodies when they get vaccinated.

There's no way to tell the "long term effects of everything". There are too many variables.

Simple statistics: most people have been vaccinated, and life expectancy is in the 70s. Compare that to the third world, where most are not vaccinated, and life expectancy is somewhere in the 40s and 50s.

true true

For the record, I am not in favor of any ENFORCED health care by any government. Its your body, if you want to deal with whatever live virus that comes along for which there is a vaccine available, go for it.

Its just that as a scientist, it pains me to see anecdotal evidence, incomplete or out-of-context information or vague statements of belief spread throughout discussions about healthcare concerns. Its unfortunate that the court of public opinion doesn't require solid proof for judgements, and even more unfortunate that the complexities of the human population make it impossible for the medical & scientific communities to provide double-blinded, completely controlled studies for all questions.