*Yikes! My five-month-old son just hit the keyboard's "back" button, and that erased my entire response!!!! Now I have to retype it!*
PLEASE VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN!
Here are some points, probably made shorter from what I typed before my lovely, sweet, handsome little son ERASED IT! LOL
1. If an unvaccinated child gets ill with one of these preventable diseases, s/he has a 5-10% chance of giving it to MY CHILDREN, who are both vaccinated. Granted that's a 90-95% chance they won't, but I don't like any chances. Don't put my kids at risk over unproven "facts."
2. The Thimerosal connection is unproven. Yes, mercury is bad, but A. it's so minuscule that your child probably encounters more in the general environment than in a shot. If you're this worried about mercury, DON'T USE THE NEW CFL LIGHT BULBS, as they contain mercury, which is bad if they get broken!
3. Most shots don't have Thimerosal. I'd have to look it up, but I believe a doctor/nurse told me that its use in Illinois vaccinations was supposed to get banned a while back. Again, I am not certain of this. Either way, only one of my 5yo daughter's shots had it in 2002.
4. Speaking of my daughter: she is autistic. I am 100% sure it had nothing to do with vaccinations. It turns out that autism can run in families. My brother has Asperger Syndrome, and my sister has ADHD (one of her daughters is ADD, another is either ADD or ODD), our mom is ADD, and I'm ADD, possibly some Asperger. When we look back, almost everyone who knows my daughter can see some of the subtle signs since she was a baby. She is on the under-stimulated side of Sensory Processing Disorder (as opposed to easily over stimulated), and those traits were there from the start.
5. The "sudden, rapid spread of autism" may not be so sudden. The diagnostic criteria have been greatly expanded over the past decade or two. My brother was not diagnosed until he was in college because he didn't display what was "typical" autistic behavior. Think back: there have ALWAYS been children/adults who displayed what can now be considered ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) traits. Einstein is believed to have had Asperger. DaVinci, too. There have always been kids who "talked late" or just seemed behind all the others. Autism, ADD, and other learning disabilities can explain many of those cases. Personally, I suspect that if there is more autism due to environmental factors, it's not as great an increase as people think.
6. Reactions to vaccinations are normal. It's in the literature they give you. The body is being tricked into thinking there's an attack. It's only natural to not feel well after any kind of vaccination. But the vaccination contains dead or near-dead virus unable to make you truly ill. A couple days of feeling blech is a great tradeoff to dying or being permanently affected by a disease. HOWEVER, some people do react to the egg-based medium. The doctor can provide a different source for those people.
Please, it is SO IMPORTANT to vaccinate. This is how smallpox has been eradicated in the United States. What a horrible disease! And polio--who doesn't know someone stricken by this debilitating disease? If you don't, look into FDR.
When you do "research," keep in mind that not every study is viable. A proper study needs to maintain strict controls, have a large number of subjects (the larger the better--fifty people a study does NOT make), and be conducted by open-minded scientists. Even then, the results can be interpreted in countless ways. You also need to see who is funding the research and whether it's conducted through a reputable institution. I'm all about anecdotal "evidence," but it needs to be backed up in some way.
"False correlations" abound in frightening ways. Saying a shot made a kid autistic just because the symptoms showed up soon after a round of shots is like saying "A bird flew into my window after I farted, therefore my farts make birds fly into windows."
You can see I'm passionate about this issue. I would love for people to start being more careful about making bold statements such as "Vaccinations cause autism."
To be honest, I worried about this for a while before we even knew we had a problem. I always said, though, that I'd rather have an autistic child than a dead child due to a preventable disease.
I love my kids fiercely, and I will continue to have them vaccinated to prevent horrid diseases.