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Vaccines Being Taken For Granted?
By Richard | October 12, 2007
Paul Howard | Special To The washingtonpost.com’s Think Tank Town
Recently, when visiting family in Philadelphia, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing friends of ours and their baby daughter, Iona. While the proud papa and I swapped complaints about health care — his as a father, mine as a policy wonk — the topic of vaccines came up. Why, he asked, had companies ever put a mercury-based preservative (thimerosal) in vaccines and why did doctors administer those “dangerous” vaccines to children?
My friend is highly educated, very intelligent, and he naturally worries about anything that could affect the health of his daughter. But while many studies have failed to link thimerosal (phased-out of childhood vaccines by 2001) with developmental disorders like autism, he either hadn’t heard of them or else just didn’t trust them.
Sadly, too many parents have lost faith in vaccines. Partly, this is because of a “generation gap.” In 1940, U.S. infant mortality rates stood at 40 deaths per 1,000 live births. Tens of thousands more children would go on to be killed or maimed by measles, polio and chicken pox. Today, infant mortality averages about 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, and those other diseases have been largely vanquished by vaccines. A childhood free of serious illness is now taken for granted. MORE
Topics: Mercury/Thimerosol, Vaccines |