Too dumb to protect the herd
I went to the doctors last week and have just gotten a call from my doctor stating that I’ve been exposed to the measles. A patient who had been unvaccinated came into the surgery with measles which means everyone who had been in the surgery 2 hours after the patient had been there was exposed. Same with the staff as well. Vaccinated peeps should be fine as long as you’ve had your updated MMR boosters but I can’t see kids under 1 nor my parents or immunocompromised friends until September 2 and the incubation period is over. Going to work will be a pain as there are 3 pregnant women in the office. I’ve seen my IC friends and parents during the incubation period so they need to go to the doctors.
So because of one unvaccinated person, older people, young children too young to be vaccinated and IC people are at risk in my life, not too mention the other patients exposed.
I find this article quite adequate considering the day I’ve had:
Endangering the Herd By Jed Lipinski
What if a mother decided not to vaccinate her daughter for measles, based on rumours that the vaccine causes autism, and her daughter gets the disease at the age of 4 and passes it to a 1-year-old, who is too young for the vaccine, at her daycare centre. And what if that baby dies?
That’s the sad scenario, more or less, of a Season 10 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. And it’s the hypothetical case study in a provocative paper in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics that explores whether there’s a case for holding people legally accountable for the damage they cause by not vaccinating their children. “One can make a legitimate, state-sanctioned choice not to vaccinate,” the bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan and his co-authors write, “but that does not protect the person making that choice against the consequences of that choice for others.”
Since epidemiologists today can reliably determine the source of a viral infection, the authors argue, a parent who decides not to vaccinate his kid and thus endangers another child is clearly at fault and could be charged with criminally negligent homicide or sued for damages.
Click the link to read the rest of the article.
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