Chris -- of course I fully recognize the political, economic, and
environmental effects of formula-feeding, but in the context where I made my
comments I was speaking only to the *health effects*.  If my neighbor
chooses to formula-feed her child, it doesn't affect MY children's health
(even though it does certainly affect the economy, the environment, etc.).
But if my neighbor chooses not to immunze her child, then it does put MY
children's health at risk.  That was my point.  And since so many people
wrote to ask how not immunizing a child affects other people's children's
health:


>How is that so if vaccines are supposed to provide protection once
>immunized, what risk does my unimmunized child provide?

Because vaccinations are not 100% guarantee of not ever getting the disease
-- just as being breastfed does not reduce one's risk of disease to 0%, but
merely lowers it from what the formula-fed child risk is.  Vaccinations work
only if you can reduce the number of susceptible people below a certain
level, so that the disease cannot propogate itself and maintain itself in
the population.  As the number of unvaccinated children in a population
creeps up, the greater the risk that the disease can keep itself going and
circulate among the population and infect those who *were* vaccinated but
who didn't get 100% protection from the vaccine.

For example, say a college student whose vaccination for measles was not
100% effective visits your home when your child has measles, and the college
student becomes infected.  He doesn't know he has the disease yet, and he
goes back to college and over the course of a week comes in contact with
over 1,000 other students.  Even if all of those students had their vaccines
as children, some will be susceptible still, and will get sick.  Some will
have partial protection and get a mild case, but others may have no
protection, and get a serious case.  Measles in an adult is a *nasty*
disease, and may kill some of the students and leave others permanently
infertile.  Imagine if some of those 1,000 college students were never
immunized and never had the disease as children, and contract measles as an
adult because one of their classmates visited your home.

The greater the percentage of children who are not vaccinated and therefore
are at risk of getting and spreading the disease, the greater the risk to
adults who were not immunized or whose immunizations were ineffective.  And
imagine if those 1,000 students then go to their other classes -- soon you
have all 43,000 students at the university exposed to infection.  And then
students who feel crummy go home for the weekend, and spread the disease to
other people in their hometown.  It goes on and on.

In order for vaccinations to have their maximum impact on preventing
disease, everyone in the population must be vaccinated.  That's how the
World Health Organization rid the Earth of smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s
-- by vaccinating a huge percentage of the world's children, so that the
disease died out.  It's how the World Health Organization rid the Western
hemisphere of polio, and how they hope to rid the Eastern hemisphere of
polio in the coming decade.

I know people who say they won't get their child vaccinated with polio
because there is so little chance of them getting it in the US -- but all
those kids have to do is go to college in the US with students from the
Eastern hemisphere where polio is still rampant.

Kathy Dettwyler

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