I'm supposed to be going through my Small Pox case study right now, in preparing for my International Health exam.. but I thought, this is as good a time as any to just go through a few of my thoughts regarding Vaccines.
I know many people don't think that vaccines are not for their child, and I guess I can respect that, but just make sure you do read and research into it.
This goes over general info that parents should know about vaccines, though it is quite vague and doesn't go into the topic too much.
I think there are two things that bother parents most:
1) the whole deal with autism being connected to the MMR Vaccine
We were discussing this in class and my prof was saying how tired she is of this topic... because that myth was debunked ages ago.. Apparently there were many things regarding the legitimacy of the research and the authors that wrote it. In fact, all of the authors that were part of that research took their word back and agreed that it was a mistake except one. It was later found out that the one author that didn't was getting paid to write the article by a pharmaceutical company. Also, when repeated again, the research failed to provide the same results and many researchers pointed out that the reason they got those results in the first place was that they got their results at the same time as when the signs of autism are apparent (which is when a child is around 13 - 15 months). Anyway, the whole argument of the article was about thermisole anyway (a mercury based compound) and they have already taken that out of the vaccines they give now.
Which brings us to 2) The worry that Thermisole will affect the brain.. Thermisole is not mercury, it's mercury based and they didn't find anything that proved that it was harmful.. but because of the fear, and the dupe research paper on autism, they have taken it out of the vaccines all together like many years ago.
3) Many parents argue that vaccines may cause side affects that we don't know about yet, like some of the stuff on the swine flu vaccine that came out
I think you can't compare the Measles, Polio, Mumps etc. vaccines to the flu and swine flu vaccines.. why? because every year, there is a new flu vaccine made because of the different strains of flu, and the swine flu vaccine was also newly made. The amount of research done on the big vaccines given to kids (ie. polio, measles, pertusis, tetunus, diptheria and TB) does not even compare to the research done on the flu vaccines. Also, if your kids have the flu, they'll get over it within a couple of days, it's not a big deal.. if your kids have polio, they'll be disabled for life or even paralyzed! na authobillah.. may Allah swt protect our little ones. ameen. So, go ahead, don't give them the flu vaccine and rely on natural immunity, but taking a chance on the other sever diseases is not the smartest in my opinion.
I think people fail to realize how serious these diseases are, and they also fail to see that they are communicable, which means they can spread in the community like wild fire and their effects are not just a sneeze, cough or fever, it's paralysis, extreme extreme rashes and scars all over the body and intense sickness you can't even imagine.. why can't we imagine it? because alhamdulillah because of those same vaccines, we live in a society that is almost free of these diseases.
Don't get me wrong, my own marmee is against vaccines.. and yes, though I have tremendous respect for her and her opinions, I do disagree with this one.
*EDIT* ...I put pictures up, but they were kinda gruesome, so i took them off.. i think you should google some of these diseases that our kids are vaccinated for and see the severity of them..
on another note, my MIL actually told me that her first son (he passed away) had Polio - he contracted it because at the time she did not know about vaccinations. Well, after he passed away, the doctor told her that if he had been alive, he would have been disabled for life. Needless to say, all her sons and the kids in their family are now vaccinated.
I don't know, i guess in the end it's up to the parents to decide.. like i came across a document on some site called 'natural news' which said that vaccines may cause a number of other side affects and doctors just want you to get vaccinated because they want to charge you extra for the side effects.. honestly, to me this sounds like the many conspiracy theories that are already out there (my notes tell me that the global cost of one of these vaccinations to the governments was 2.3 billion dollars.. so it doesn't make sense that vaccines that are so expensive would be a means to get our $$).
... And, you know, I would believe these documents too if I wasn't studying some of these diseases, reading articles about the epidemics they've caused and watching documentaries about how vaccines have helped countries like Africa and India from viruses like Small Pox (in which 1/3 of the cases die, if they live, they have severe lesions for the rest of their life and most end up blind) etc. etc.
So there, that's my $0.01 on the issue. It's all for you to decide and discuss this issue with your family doctor.. don't just accept claims from both sides, especially not from websites that sell t-shirts on the side or have google ads on them :p
