Whooping Cough Outbreak: Pertussis and the Death-rattle of Reason

[Lucy Goosey]

http://blogs.edmontonjournal.com/2012/07/25/whooping-cough-outbreak-pertussis-and-the-death-rattle-of-reason/

It’s a 21st century childhood, the kind most of us take for granted. Our children are no longer stalked by polio and diphtheria, red measles and smallpox. Once upon a time – when my own parents were children – deadly epidemics were a fact of life, and of death. Today, we live so removed from those horrors, we cannot imagine them.

And that, I fear, is some of the problem. Some people, of course, refuse to have their children vaccinated for deeply held religious, cultural, or ideological reasons. Others, though, just don’t bother to take their kids for shots, because they figure these diseases are gone, and that they just needn’t bother. Or they assume that even if their kids do get sick, we now have the antibiotics we need to cure them.

But whether our current low vaccination rates are being pushed down by ignorance or sloth or pride or wrath, we are sinning against our children, our community, and the cause of rationality, when we fail to have our children immunized.

I’m not shill for “big pharma” or the medical establishment. As a professional skeptic, I keep an open mind about pushing drug companies to back their claims with double-bind studies, with peer reviewed results they can replicate. Over the centuries, the medical establishment has been proved wrong, and our ideas about treatment have evolved.