So with any of the things like rubella, measals, hep...are they curable once you contract them??? Sorry if I sound totally clueless.
In a healthy person, the majority of the time, these diseases are all self-limiting. Meaning that the disease runs it's course, your immune system neutralizes it, you recover having gained immunity and having no long lasting effects. So in the majority of cases, there is really nothing there to cure - the body just does it's job and that's the end of the story.
Then the more I read it's like, what if your baby gets some horrible disease??? There is a reason we dont have any crazy diseases anymore. With so many people bringing them over I would be so dang paranoid with my baby not being protected.
Well, many of the diseases were already on the decline before the vaccines were introduced. Some of them the diagnostic criteria was changed right at the same time or right after the vaccine was introduced, so that cases which previously would've been diagnosed as the disease no longer were. Polio is a case in point - the definition was changed in 1967 so that not all cases of acute flacid paralysis were called polio. Prior to then, anyone with acute flacid paralysis was diagnosed with polio. Interestingly enough, 95% of all people who contract the polio virus get nothing more than cold symptoms.
Diptheria is also another case of change in disease classification. I don't remember when the change was made, but up until a certain point, croup and diptheria were grouped together for statistics.
The other thing that's interesting is that sometimes dr's just quit diagnosing illnesses if somebody has been vaccinated for it. Some dr.'s just out and out refuse to consider a diagnosis if the child has been vaccinated for it. Whooping cough (pertussis,) is an example of this. Despite relatively low # of cases reported, serology testing in adults has revealed that on average adults are exposed to pertussis every 2 to 4 yrs as evidenced by an increase in antibody levels. The CDC just recently released that upwards of 100,000 cases of pertussis go undiagnosed each year and that it hasn't been being diagnosed as often as it should be.
And then there's the whole issue of adults and if they're up to date on their vaccines or not... The vast majority of adults are not up to date - TDaP is recommended for all adults every 10yrs now, so next time you go in for a tetanus booster pertussis will be part of it. Funny thing about the pertussis vaccine - aside from it being woefully ineffective, is that being vaccinated may prevent the person from developing clinical pertussis, but it does absolutely nothing to prevent the transmission from person to person. So a vaccinated person could be infected with pertussis and spread it simply because they don't develop symptoms.
There's a very interesting history to vaccines when you really start digging. The first vaccine with info readily available is the small-pox vaccine. Interestingly enough, back in the very beginning of it's use, the reactions and deaths from the vaccine led to vaccines themselves being outlawed. Obviously things changed from that point. Eventually the vaccine came into use again - with the quality control supposedly improved, and after that more vaccines came about.
My response to how the vaccine preventable diseases have really decreased, is to ask about the increase in juvenile diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, asthma, autism, ADD/ADHD, learning disorders - have we traded routine childhood illnesses for a lifetime of medical complications?
This may sound crass, but I don't care about the greater good when it comes to vaccination. I care about the health and welfare of my own children, and for them that means not vaccinating. I'm not willing to sacrifice my own children for something that may or may not work.
My ds is also a preemie and it did make me rethink the whole vaccination issue... but I came to the same conclusions even taking into account his being premature and having a weaker immune system. Vaccines are known to weaken the immune system as a whole for the weeks immediately following vaccination... why weaken an already comparitively weaker immune system?
We as a society have been conditioned to fear disease. Our parents and grandparents all went through measles and mumps and chicken pox and rubella as just a routine childhood illness - for them it was the same way we view the chicken pox. And by the time our kids are having kids, chicken pox will likely have been made into a killer disease too. We worry about some of these diseases because we've been taught to. Ask your mom if she worried about you developing invasive pneumococcal disease or HiB. Depending on your age and the ages of your siblings, your mom may not have even heard of these diseases. Heck, think about vit K and the eye goop - even back when my youngest bro was born in 83 the hospitals didn't do that. Yet now we're led to believe our kid could die if we refuse those. For that matter, they didn't do GBS tests during pregnancy either.
I guess my whole point is, that we've been bred to fear disease instead of to respect it and appreciate that it can serve a purpose. As a society we would do far better to focus on supporting the body and immune system as a whole then to spend time worrying about illness and injecting chemicals and foreign viruses and bacteria and DNA.
FWIW, my MIL did measles and mumps parties for dh and his siblings - and he's the oldest of 3 and is 32yrs old. Things have changed a lot in 20 yrs, and those diseases are much less common - but has our health improved as a result?
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