Sheesh, its just chicken pox... is it mandatory for school?

Chicken pox can have some pretty serious complications in kids with asthma, I think.

OK, I can't find a cite for that right now, but it can cause serious problems if a pregnant woman who never had the disease or the vaccine is exposed to a kid who's infected.

Just like tonsilitis, chicken pox is more dangerous as you get older.

Also, vaccination for mumps has been standard for years, and mumps really isn't that much more serious than chicken pox for most people.

The university I'm at now requires either a chicken pox vaccine, a culture that shows you've been exposed and have immunity, or a doctor's records showing that you've had it, for any student under 26. (I went the doctor's records route, which took a bit of research -- I had chicken pox when I was three years old, which was several doctors ago. So I didn't have any records from the doctor who actually saw me then, but I had Dr. K.'s records, which said that Dr. R.'s records said that Dr. B.'s records said that I had chicken pox in July 1984.)

I have mixed feelings, but...

I just wish the HPV vaccine had been invented and mandatory 20 years ago. Almost everyone sexually active has some form of HPV (or multiple forms); I think the current stats are over 95%, so pretty much everyone reading this post. I know I have at least one strain since I was treated for abnormal cervical cells nearly 15 years ago. I've been lucky--I haven't had an abnormal Pap since, so it's possible that I have one of the dozens of mostly harmless strains which will never flare up again--but it is equally possible that one of the dangerous strains is waiting in remission to give me cancer.

I also have pretty strong feelings about taking necessary steps to eradicate diseases. My grandfather lived the last 30 years of his life paralyzed from the neck down because of Polio, and my father permenantly lost 50% of the muscle mass in his legs from the same. Because the government was incredibly proactive once the vaccine was invented, I never had to have it. Thirty years of mandatory vaccines had eradicated Polio in the US, and I was born the year after they lifted the mandatory vaccination of all children.

I'm usually crazy pro Civil Rights girl, but when it comes to deadly diseases? I want mandatory vaccines.

I get itchy with the anti-vac crowd when it comes to common and dangerous illnesses but I don't see the point in making them get their kids vaccinated. If they lose a child to a common, preventable illness (at any age), it's their loss, not mine.

OK, but the risk is not just to them. Vaccines have a limited protection for the person getting vaccinated if they are the only one taking them. In the case HPV I think is 75%, in other more. The real protection is the herd affect. If everone or almost everyone takes it then when it fails for one person, the odds are it won't be passed on to someone else, and if it is, the odds are it won't get passed to the next person.

So if you are vaccinated and no one else is , you still have a 1 in 4 chance of catching if exposed and a real good chance of getting exposed. But if everybody (or nearly everybody has the vaccine, you have a three in four chance of resistance if exposed, plus a good chance of not getting exposed.

Incidentally, this is why boys should be vaccinated against HPV as well. In addition to the chance that it does something we don't know about to them, even if they are asymptomatic they can pass it on to girls. If boys are vaccinated as well as girls you get a much better herd affect.

OK, but the risk is not just to them. Vaccines have a limited protection for the person getting vaccinated if they are the only one taking them. In the case HPV I think is 75%, in other more. The real protection is the herd affect. If everone or almost everyone takes it then when it fails for one person, the odds are it won't be passed on to someone else, and if it is, the odds are it won't get passed to the next person.

So if you are vaccinated and no one else is , you still have a 1 in 4 chance of catching if exposed and a real good chance of getting exposed. But if everybody (or nearly everybody has the vaccine, you have a three in four chance of resistance if exposed, plus a good chance of not getting exposed.

Incidentally, this is why boys should be vaccinated against HPV as well. In addition to the chance that it does something we don't know about to them, even if they are asymptomatic they can pass it on to girls. If boys are vaccinated as well as girls you get a much better herd affect.

Typo Boy said beautifully the last part of what I was thinking. If a vaccination is only relevant to the kid getting it (i.e. not a contagious virus or disease), then I agree that it should be up to the parents. In this case, I completely agree that all children should be vaccinated, male and female. It's not about protecting just your child--it's about lessening the risk to everyone.

mumps really isn't that much more serious than chicken pox for most people.

Huh. I always thought it was more dangerous than that. Now I must wkikipedia it, mumps, and rubella...

Here's the thing about the HPV vaccine, to me, though: Obviously, the company that developed it is making a big play for use as a cancer preventative tool. But cervical cancer isn't that common, and not all cases are related to HPV. I'm looking at this big PDF [link] and it's about half as common among women as cancer of the rectum.

Obviously, it's a good idea to prevent disease, but I have to believe the colossal PR push around this is just to sell the vaccine.

This report is pretty interesting. Women overall have a 1 in 3 chance of getting some kind of cancer in their lifetime. It's a 1 in 8 chance of breast cancer, 1 in 17 chance of lung and bronchus, 1 in 38 of uterine corpus, 1 in 135 of uterine cervix.

Jesse, that was part of my thinking too... but now that Hil has sent me off to Wikipedia measels, mumps, and rubella...

Turns out they're hardly ever fatal. I always assumed they were something far more grim than the chicken pox I and everyone I knew ended up having. They CAN have further effects, (particularly if pregnant women are exposed) but they're largely more distressing than dangerous.