Yes I remember my 1974 chicken pox party quite clearly. “everyone has to tongue eachother”. We were 4. I ended up with mumps! That surprised everyone!
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Ditto. As I replied to one of these posts months ago, my GP signed me up for the Shingles vaccine but they are totally backlogged. I may lose coverage soon or be forced to switch providers due to a job change and am STILL waiting. It’s been about 9 months now. I hope I won’t be forced to switch providers and start over in their queue.
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Having two young children myself now, this is an approach I don’t entirely understand, especially when it comes to colds. People say it’s great for kids to “get it over with” developing their immune systems, but damn it would be nice if it could wait until they are old enough to sleep without a pacifier or their thumb (which you can’t do with a stuffy nose) blow their noses properly, and take nyquil. Same could be said for the “don’t scratch” of chickenpox, and the fact that they can’t take adult doses of painkillers.
Of course, I’m sure there are legit medical reasons why immune development should happen when their younger, but damn sick babies are a pain in the ass.
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This dickhead and the circles he runs in can afford to take a week off work if he gets sick.
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I had chicken pox in 1974, when I was 4 too.
I never got to go to a kid orgy though.
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I think the idea is that Chicken Pox can hit you harder if you catch it when you’re an adult.
But of course now that we have a vaccine we could theoretically wipe the disease off the face of the planet entirely if everyone got on board for a couple of generations, just like we killed smallpox.
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I think you may be missing some critical information you should probably consider. When these children who have been exposed to chicken pox get shingles later in life, they can infect people with chicken pox decades after their initial exposure. In essence, the exposed become carriers later in life who then spread the disease further. Additionally, since shingles often develops later in life, the chances of them infecting an older person is increased and that’s when chicken pox has the best chance to kill.
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So… what’s your argument here? If it’s not a large number of people dying unnecessarily, it’s cool, because it’s not likely to be anyone you know personally?
Previous to vaccines, in the US over 100 people died each year from chickenpox, with about 10,000 being hospitalized (not to mention the damage done to fetuses, miscarriages, sterility in men, etc.). If you’re so morally bankrupt that’s not a big deal to you, I have nothing to say.
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So – I want to make sure I’m reading this correctly – we’re supposed to cause widespread misery, death, and lifelong complications in children to save adults – who have already had the childhood disease – from having to get boosters?
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It’s expensive to send 9 kids to college.
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Then today’s your day. Meet Portland pediatrician Paul Thomas.
With chicken pox it’s because the severity and risk of complications or long term harm is significantly higher for adults. And that’s true of some other diseases as well. But for many of the diseases we vaccinate against, and the particularly dangerous ones especially, the inverse is true. The flu is in that category, children and the elderly are the most likely to die due to flu. And I think Polio in adults much more commonly presents as harmless flu like symptoms. Where as in kids that whole paralysis and nerve damage thing is common enough to be the main thing we think about with the disease.
I’m not aware of any reason to believe immunity gained in child hood is any better, longer lived or what have than immunity gained later in life. Whether from vaccinations or exposure to illness. And the whole get it over with early mentality seems more based in the idea that kids are less likely to remember suffering the earlier they go through it.
Though the anti-vax movement is now pushing the idea that “natural” immunity through infection is better or stonger than that provided by vaccines. And so infecting your kids with shit as early as possible is the best practice.
Generally speaking we vaccinate kids early because they’re at the greatest risk of harm from these things, or long term effects. And covering a bigger portion of the life span of a population is an important factor for reducing overall incidence.
For colds this doesn’t matter at all. Getting a cold doesn’t make you immune to the common cold. There are too many strains, too many viruses involved, and they mutate too fast. It’s the same reason we don’t have a universal flu vaccine. There are multiple flu viruses in circulation at any given time, and by the next flu season they’ve all changed sufficiently for you to get sick from the same strains all over again.
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Oh, there are most certainly some out there, much to the frustration of the rest of us. And the AAP has not grown the testicular fortitude to do anything about it. Dr. Bob Sears in CA was personally responsible for one of the measles outbreaks there that began in his waiting room! Just as you can find “climate scientist” who question global warming, you can find pediatricians who “question” vaccines. they are generally catering to a certain type of (frequently cash-paying) patients, and handing out vaccine exemptions for a fee. If there were any actual justice, they would be subject to discipline, but there is not. Well, TBH, Dr. Bob finally did get a minor slap on the wrist, but generally, nothing.
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I got this one folks, and I’m trying to keep it civil here.
Andrew Wakefield is the guy who came up with the “Autism is related to vaccinations” scam. He should be in the Trump University hall of fame for toxic grifting. It’s literally a scam meant to replace the current infrastructure of MMR vaccine delivery with a vaccine for MMR that he had personally patented 9 months before he conducted the “study” (12 kids does not a relevant statistical study make, PLUS his study was designed to conflate correlation with causation. In this case, “most cases of autism are not IDENTIFIABLE until the kids are 2 years old or older” with “kids are not vaccinated until they are two years old or older”. (Unless the kid is really severely affected, it takes things like speech delays and missed milestones to clue the parents into the problem). One of the reasons that people do get more autism diagnoses nowadays is that we know what to look for (Autism used to be split from Asbergers by way of speech delays). This is why my dad and I were not diagnosed when we were kids, but my younger brother was.
I like this link (Easy to read) : https://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html
and this link: (contains the source material) http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm
Initially Wakefield was a gastroenterologist who came up with a new type of vaccine for MMR. He then went and applied to get his vaccine patented. He then applied to have his vaccine set up as the new standard MMR vaccine, to which he was told “No, the current vaccine is safe, and we have already invested in all of this infrastructure for producing and distributing the current vaccine globally”.
This is when the scam starts in earnest and he gets his study done.
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Don’t tell me you also had mumps!
Getting chicken pox as a kid to prevent shingles later in life was S.O.P. for older generations. Getting the varicella vaccine as a kid will not prevent shingles; you’ll need at least one more booster in adulthood. Similarly getting full blown chicken pox wasn’t a surefire way to avoid shingles but given the relatively low severity (I itched for a few days, was not one with complications) parents managed the selective quarantining or exposure of kids to keep it sort of contained with herd immunity in the late-childhood-to-middle-age population. Kept the poxy grandkids away from Grandma and Grandpa and things mostly worked out.
Umm, that is just about exactly wrong. If you had chicken pox, you can get shingles. Getting chicken pox to prevent shingles was never a thing, not even back when. The vaccine seems to at the very least decrease the incidence of shingles in the vaccinated population. The issue being discussed in our field is whether it increases the incidence in older, unvaccinated folks.
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If it was, and I doubt it, it was based on false information. Getting chickenpox as a kid is what causes shingles later on, because the virus stays in the body for life.
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Good to know; all the folk advice I heard as a kid was not-surprisingly wrong.
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My grandparents’ chicken coop had chicken pocks. Later, when it got bigger, it had shingles, too.
(Seriously, I had both chicken pox and mumps as a kid. I don’t remember having chicken pox, but remember that having mumps was painful.)
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