vaccine_exemptions_revised.0

The state that leads the country in child vaccination rates probably isn’t the one you think.

Source: www.vox.com

I had measles back in 1977, when I was too young to be vaccinated during an outbreak in the Southern California region.  My father-in-law still lives with the effects of Polio that he contracted when he was a toddler, right around the time of Jonas Salk’s great discovery that lead to the Polio vaccine.  I care about this issue because the effects are personal–but for too many, they’ve never known the realities of a world before vaccines. We collectively have forgotten WHY life expectancy and have steadily gone up over the decades at the same time that infant mortality rates have dropped.  It’s in large part because the nightmarish diseases of yesteryear have been eliminated, if we collectively are all immunized. Unfortunately, this is the discouraging truth (for now): anti-vaxxers are nearly impossible to convince. I hope this current measles outbreak is the tipping point for their to be enough public sentiment to lead to change, because the status quo is not acceptable; 113 countries currently have a better immunization rate for measles than the United States (here is Jon Stewart’s always entertaining rant on the topic). 

 Tags:  medical, diffusion, perspective.