Vaccinated: The origins of our routine vaccinations
Sunday, June 24th, 2007Some topics of discussion can really get parents riled up - cloth vs. disposable diapers, circumcise or not, breast vs. bottle, cry it out vs. co-sleeping, on and on and on. And another topic that can get heated is that of vaccinations. Do you vaccinate on schedule according to doctors, do you refuse them altogether, or do you pick and choose? I don’t want to debate that, thanks. At least not today. (My answer though? I followed most of the major vaccinations, took a couple of “optional” ones, and refused flu and chicken pox. There you go.)
My reason for bringing it up though is that, thanks to the Parent Blogger’s Network I was given the chance to read and review a free copy of Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases by Paul Offit, MD. He writes about a man whose name isn’t known to many people but we’re all familiar with his work - his name is Maurice Hilleman and he developed vaccines to combat mumps, measles, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chicken pox, pneumoccoccus, meningococcus, and Hib. Out of all those, I have had my children treated for all but, as I said, the chicken pox (and Breanna still needs her booster for MMR).
Had Hilleman not done this for us, my children could be at risk for dying or being severely disabled because of these diseases that we can now fight.