Saturday, February 02, 2013

Get Your Flu Shot Already! (Wherein One Mother Bemoans The Rise of Pseudoscience)

Seriously - get your flu shot.  Get your kids their flu shots.  I'm not kidding.  It is important.   

When you work in a public school, there is no way to escape the horribly dangerous nature of influenza, especially this season.  It is epidemic, it is severe and it is scary, both at inner-city schools and also in posh gifted programs like the one my own child attends. 

The pneumonia, the dangerously high fevers, the hospitalizations...you should not be exposing your child to this because you have ever so unfortunately fallen prey to a bunch of crazy-spawned and untrue hype about vaccines.  

Honestly, the pseudoscience is so thick these days, it makes me want to vomit.

Vaccines are good.  They do not cause autoimmune disorders.  They do not cause autism.  

Are they totally without risk?  Of course not.  Is any medicine you have ever given yourself or your child totally without risk?  No.  There will always that one weird person for whom apples are poison, don't even mention penicillin or a vaccine - life is an extremely variable thing.   Don't extrapolate in crazy-inaccurate land because of this fact.

I partly blame doctors.  So many of them are so sure that people can't understand complexities  and gray areas that they try to go black-and-white so starkly that it is lying - "there is no reason to worry about live, attenuated viruses in pertussis vaccines - no need to make them acellular" - "this is 100% safe".  It only takes one parent who has tragically discovered that there was a good reason to develop the now used acellular pertussis vaccine or that their child was allergic to the eggs that their vaccine grew from to start an Internet frenzy that results in alls-the-science being suspect.

But, please.

There are things to be concerned about, yes.   So many vaccines given at one time in infancy could potentially expose babies to levels of metals the safety of which has not been adequately tested.  Allergies are scary.  People who are chronically ill or immuno-suppressed can, rarely,  become ill with the vaccinated-against illness from live-virus vaccines (although normally healthy people do not, and no one does from acellular vaccines!!!).  Sometimes politicians get in bed with Merck and have things approved before they are ready.  A parent does need to pay attention to these matters, even if their doctor would rather that they leave the thinking to them.

I made sure my younger daughter got no more than two vaccines at once (except for the DPT  and the MMR one-shots).  I ask to read each vial so I can avoid excessive mercury exposure.  I wait until a vaccine is on the AAP's recommended schedule before giving it to my children and I waited until Gardisil had been out and working for a few years to give it to my daughter after all the politics involved in its approval. I make sure my asthmatic daughter gets the acellular flu shot rather than the attenuated nose spray, although I will let my non-asthmatic daughter get the nose spray with no qualms.

I don't play doctor, though, and neither should anyone else without that level of education.

There is a huge difference between "many doctors are jerks who do not want to talk to you like you are an adult" and "ignore all real science!  Embrace the whackos!  Make your own shit up out of eighth grade-level experiments"!!!

I am so sick of the pseudoscience and all the sick schoolchildren it hurts.  If you are homeschooling your years-breastfed kids while you are at home with them and they have little truck with large groups of children, it may not seem like a big deal to you - you don't see it.  The kids who go to ballet or soccer with your kid hopefully stay home for those one or two weekly lessons when they are sick.  They probably can't miss a whole week or three of school, though - don't think you know what it is like in the world that most children must inhabit.  

There seem to be two main communities that embrace the pseudoscience - right-wing religious nuts and my natural parenting freak friends.  There is a lot of overlap between the two groups on a surprising number of issues.  I love the natural parenting freaks.  They are my bestest friends.   I am as much one of them as someone who has to manage as a full-time employed mother without a staff can be.  I also nursed my children in terms of years and carried them around in slings and had a family bed and stuff - they are my tribe.  

They are wrong about this, though

Get your flu shots.


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