re: #387 retired cynic

My mother had measles and scarlet fever and chickenpox multiple times, and her father had shingles twice, the second lasting til the end of his life at 92. I remember being horribly sick with measles as a small child, being shut in a dark room for many days, but never had the mumps, thank dog. My husband had mumps in his bits, and it affected our lives for sure. When I got my first teaching job, I ran out and got the mumps vaccine, which was a new thing. Too bad they weren’t doing flu vaccines then, because that first year I caught every wave of it. The immune system is a funny old thing! Go Team Vaccines!

And here is the problem with “optional” advances in public safety. 95+% of children (and adults) were immunized, herd immunity took hold, and lots of disease were essentially wiped out. So, people get complacent, discover misleading research, and start not vaccinating. Nothing happens at first (herd immunity!), but as the anti-vax crowd grows, herd immunity falls away, and suddenly the parents who were screaming that “Measles is just like the flu!” start losing children as epidemics of those “essentially wiped out” diseases start making the rounds. Lots of people don’t think that anything that happened before their lifetime matters.