[quote]on edge wrote:
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
One other comment: on edge, you have obviously put a great deal of thought into this, not just clicked a few autism links, so I give you credit for that even if I disagree with your course of action.
I do have a question to pose as a follow up to your listing of the specific diseases and the general belief that your kids are low-risk because of where you live and what your kids do in their free time.
Do you ever plan to travel internationally?
Do you frequent any tourist attractions?
What if your kids decide to study abroad in college?
Because while they might be safe in your home with their stay at home mom, chances are that SOMEDAY they will leave the nest, right?
We spend a lot of time talking about he outbreaks among kids right now because “kids” have a lower vaccination rate than today’s adult population, but if anti-vaxers persist we will soon have an adult population with lower vax rates than the previous generation, and we’ll start seeing some of these diseases in adults, too.[/quote]
We’ve never left the country. We do take two trips a year. I fly, the wife & kids drive. Haha That’s not due to germ fear or anything. It’s because it’s expensive to fly 5 and I can’t miss that much work by doing a long road trip just to get to our destination.
One of our trips is to Southern California and we go to Laguna Beach every single day. The other trip is deep into the heart of Mormon country where we hike every day. We’re not afraid to go to ammusment parks or anything. We just like the outdoor activities. We used to go to a lot of kid places around town but by the time we had #3 those excursions were too much of a pain in the ass. We do get a lot less colds since we stopped that.
The stories we hear occasionally of college kids and meningitis are scary as fuck and I’d consider vaccines going into college. My oldest boy is 13 now and I know who he is and the course he’s on very well. He’s such a homebody I suspect he will live at home and go to JC until he’s 20. If he chooses to leave home and go off to college at 18 you will hear my jaw hit the floor. It won’t surprise me if he goes thru life and never gets drunk. I won’t worry about this stuff too much for him but he will be be old enough to make such choices by that time.[/quote]
It’s funny how you assume you have total control over the kind of pathogens you and your family are exposed. Because most of the time you don’t. It just needs one infected individual and a little bit of bad luck, which based on the number of interactions anybody has with other people, is not impossible at all. E.g. I heard about a waitress getting hepatitis because a diabetic forgot his insulin needle under a napkin. Somebody sneezes on you or whatever and all you planning goes down the toilet.
I really hope the anti-vaxxing movement will not hit Europe as hard, but I have heard of cases in Berlin as well… But I guess it’s just the same with any other bullshit claim around these days… somebody still believes in it. I work at a pharmaceutical company (just as a working student, no big money involved) and they are all very, very concerned about “bad medication” and side effects. “Big Pharma” is not trying to poison you, they just try to make money by curing diseases. Sure sometimes the way some companies do it may seem questionable, e.g. pushing new, not more effective medication for a high price on patients, but in the case of vaccines, a big company could be forced to shut down if there were SERIOUS counts of bad side effects which could lead to lawsuits costing billions.
