measles outbreak

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by dellinger63

Nothing is free!

You mean I and others should pay to vaccinate kids even though I chose to have none.

Why not heavily fine the parents of kids who come down with measles and use that money to provide the 'free' service and leave me and others in the same situation the f@#k out of it.

Of course we should pay for it. We're a community, and that means we take care of each other. Jesus, what happened to a sense of civic duty in this country? Typical right wing attitude: I got mine, f*ck the rest of you all.

That said, measles immunity can wear off, and you could go deaf if you contracted measles. Everyone around you with a healthy immune system being fully vaccinated is in your own self interest, too.

And Dell, you would get free vaccines, too, in this idyllic vaccination world I dream of. You do need booster shots throughout your life. In the case of shingles, with chicken pox on the decline, people aren't getting exposed to the wild variety as an unintended booster shot. So shingles is becoming less of an old person's disease (old people were prone to it because they didn't spend as much time around children as when they were parents themselves) and more a disease that anyone who has ever had chicken pox is at risk of getting at any point. I bet in the next decade or so health insurance will start covering shingles boosters for the under 50 crowd, too.

The thing with vaccination that people don't seem to grasp is that they do not work on every person (just as every antibiotic doesn't work on every person) but unlike an antibiotic, if the vaccine didn't take, you might not know until you actually get the disease. They do work for the vast majority of people, though, so the important part in getting absolutely everyone in a population (who is not immune compromised, of course) is that there end up being so few people who aren't protected (including those for whom the vaccine didn't take) that a disease can't find enough hosts to get a hold of the unprotected population. That's why the anti-vaccine parents don't understand why it's such a big deal; diseases have been unable to get a grasp into communities for so long that they just don't grasp how bad it can get.