The city is in uproar. It’s insane, and really fun, and slightly disconcerting to be a part of this. My next statement is not meant to imply that New Orleans has the greatest fans in the land, by any means. But nobody, I’m telling you, no city in this country could possibly be as excited about a Super Bowl as this city is right now. New Orleanians party big style by nature, and this party seems to be eclipsing Mardi Gras. Though it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s Mardi Gras season – everyone’s Party On Meters are set to max capacity already.
I have been following a vaccine debate on a super favorite blog of mine, a woman who gets tons of traffic and whose support of vaccines is good for the community to see (though too qualified for my taste, as she still believes they should remain a personal choice while I firmly believe they should be compulsory). I commented, oh, probably about 5 times (5 out of a total 100 comments, so not totally insane), but some people may be linked here from that. So I’m going to link to my old vaccine blog, where I talk about my feelings on vaccines (http://gilliangaladriel.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6BBC33760B6EF0BC!3594.entry), and also to the Bad Astronomy blog (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/category/alt-med/), who has tons of scientific and statistically based info both on the safety of vaccines (about a kazillion times safer than buckling your kids in the car and going for a drive!) and on the rising number of deaths among children in areas of low vaccination. Finally, I’ll link to blogger Michelle Howley (http://mihow.com/tags/vaccinations/), who is a concerned parent who did tons of research (as she does for everything, you should have heard the saga of her selecting a mattress for her gorgeous son Emory – this woman does nothing child-related without many hours of research and thought) . Mihow, as she’s known, ultimately decided to vaccinate but on a slightly elongated schedule, which she has generously shared on her blog (along with her reasons for doing so.)
This is a truly important public health debate, in my mind, one that could either blow over or have serious consequences about 10 years from now, as our children start to grow up and wonder what the heck their crazy parents were thinking. So please, if you’re linked here because of vaccination questions, please read these other people who are either scientists or who have read info from scientists and make a truly informed choice, remembering that Dana McCaffery (http://danamccaffery.com/) would have been one year old a couple of days ago. Instead, at one month old her mother took her into her older sister’s school, to drop the bigger kid off. In less than 5 minutes in the school, Dana contracted pertussis from an unvaccinated older kid, and in less than a week she was dead. Read about how pertussis attacked her brain, and then killed her in a matter of hours, and then tell me that refusing vaccines doesn’t kill. Dude, I’m about to have a four week old again, and I cannot hide in my house until he’s 2 years old and completely vaccinated. The vaccines that we get were chosen because of their danger and/or high contagion rate. Don’t be fooled by people who say they are filled with heavy metals that will sully your preshuss babee – your preshuss babee was born with a high concentration of heavy metals in his blood anyway, from the air you breathe and the water you drink. If you want to protect your kid from pollution, focus on air, water, and food, not on vaccinations that are the lesser of two evils (the great evil, of course, being widespread death and crippling from now practically-unheard of diseases.)
Thank you, and go Saints.
*spaces won’t let me hyperlink today, so I pasted the links in for you!