We have been discussing vaccination in my class lately. Why is it important to vaccinate? Because if you don’t, dread diseases will manifest themselves and people you care about will become sick and possibly die.
Case in point: Outbreak of mumps in Monsey, Spring Valley, NY, where over 100 children have come down with the mumps. The article states is that the outbreak is limited to the religious communities who do not vaccinate their children.
So what is this telling us? Two things:
- The world that does vaccinate is creating something called “herd immunity” and limiting the spread of disease into the rest of the population.
- That these unvaccinated children and their parents are also probably at risk for getting measles and rubella, since the vaccine for mumps is contained in the same shot. Mumps is not likely to kill you, only make you pretty sick. However, the measles can make you very sick and kills 1 to 2 kids in every 1000 that get infected. In another report, 12 of 60 infected children had to be hospitalized.
I was listening to NPR the other day, and a response to why a woman is not vaccinating her children is because she trusts nature to take care of her children. That reminds me of a video I saw on the news of a young deer jumping into the lions den at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Nature took it’s course there as well.