There comes a time when outrage that children will die because of the ignorance of their parents, especially when they follow leaders with a 7th Century mindset, ceases to matter.

The children are innocent.

Their parents are not, because they follow monsters masquerading as “religious leaders.”

THEY, these UK Muslim parents, decided that vaccinations are bad because their Iman tells them so. Well guess what, boys and girls. WE in America have similar “religious leaders,” the liberals and the liberal press (read Ann Coulter’s latest book) who are panicking American parents by who now fret that hypothetical adverse reactions are actually deliberate poisons subjected upon their children by a greedy pharmaceutical industry, more interested in profit than in preventing disease. I kid you not.

If a child IS allergic to a medicine, and has evidenced hypersensitivity to immunization, that is one thing. Such children (or adults) should not be placed in danger. The population can tolerate a few people not immunized without a great fear of epidemic. But wholesale refusal of “whooping cough” or “diphtheria” or “polio” shots because certain liberal advocacy groups and the liberal media over-hype a small number of children which do evidence a strong adverse reaction, is something else.

SUCH PARENTS MAKE US ALL LESS SAFE.

Large groups of people refusing inoculations for them selves and their children increase the number of people vulnerable to the disease. These people then become the VICTIMS as well as carriers of the disease, and when it is a child, it is especially heartbreaking when the disease in question could have been prevented by an inoculation.

Yes, I know that there are some religious sects that oppose inoculation in the United States. I respect and support the right of everybody to practice whatever religion they choose. As longs as their belief does NOT endanger me or mine. And religious practices that foster the spread of disease crosses that line. These believers have NO RIGHT TO ENDANGER ME OR MY FAMILY by being vectors of infection.

Their right to practice their religion ENDS when their practice endangers others.

And in case my message is not clear enough: SUCH PARENTS, REGARDLESS OF THEIR REASONS, WHO REFUSE TO INSURE THEIR CHILDREN ARE INOCULATED AGAINST INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE REST OF US AND SHOULD BE PUNISHED FOR THEIR BEHAVIOR, BEFORE THEY MAKE THE REST OF US ILL.

I just shelled out $120 dollars to have my youngest daughter inoculated for meningitis before she moved into the dorm this month. I didn’t have to. It isn’t required by my state for college kids to be vaccinated. Nevertheless, not only am I protecting my daughter, but we are doing our part to help contain a disease that snuffs out the lives of many college students, sometimes even before that case of “flue” is diagnosed as a highly contagious disease.

Americans and western Europeans have become complacent because the major epidemics of the past are no longer threats to the rest of us. We forget how hard we all worked to achieve this.

Public health is no joke. It is requires a community response, from food preparers washing their hands after going to the bathroom, to health inspections of restaurants, to inspections of food preparation facilities to keep spoiled or diseased food from being consumed, to tracking of STDs, to statistical reporting of morbidity, and so on.

Even one death from of E-coli or salmonella is too many. And yet, every year now, we see people — whose only “crime” was to purchase food from a resturant or a store — die a painful death from one of these two food-born illnesses.

Publid health requires that ALL of us cooperate in insuring that we as individuals are not part of the problem.

So, if these UK children die of easily preventable diseases because of the follow their stupid Iman, then it is really “God’s will.” And if their neighbors string them up from lampposts for getting THEIR kids sick, that would also be “God’s will!”

Sorry for the rant, given that I have asthema and other issues, and given that even an upper respiratory infection usually causes me major flare ups that makes my life miserable (or worse), I have become intolerant of people whose ignorance or lack of consideration gets others sick.

georgej on January 28, 2007 at 4:32 PM