Homeopathy and vaccination are based on identical principles that a minute
amount of a substance "immunizes" against an offender.  I wonder how many
readers of this list are pro-homeopathy (which is touted as "natural" or
"holistic" medicine) but are anti-vaccination.  Which came first, the
chicken or the egg?  (Does this qualify as an obligatory mention of food?)

Some forms of vaccination/immunization exist in nature.  My mother
contracted a very mild case of cow-pox when she was young.  Smallpox
vaccination never "took" on her.  My husband has been vaccinated at least 15
times for smallpox (4 times during one school year) because it never
"took"--i.e., a scar never developed.  No one was ever able to explain why
in his case, other than to opine that he had "natural" immunity.

My maternal grandmother lost one baby to diphtheria, and would have lost a
second had she not stuck her fingers down the child's throat and pulled the
suffocating mass out of his trachea.  The dr. went out to the stable and
drew blood from a horse, let the serum separate and injected it into the
other children.   Not one of them contracted the highly contagious disease.
Perhaps they wouldn't have anyway, but Mammy traded the small risk of
anaphylactic death from the serum for the much greater risk of diphtheria
death.   As they say, life is full of hard decisions, and then harder ones.
What is the worth of a child's life?

My second baby reacted badly to his first DPT.   Thereafter he got only the
DT.  My third got only the DT because of the reaction of his older brother.
A couple of years ago there was a huge outbreak of diphtheria here in
Arkansas.  Who could have predicted it?  How many children were spared
because they were vaccinated?  Vaccinations may at times have terrible
consequences, but so can diseases when allowed to run their course.  And
who's to say there aren't serious sequelae that can follow disease 20, 30,
40 years down the road?  A person cannot develop terribly painful and
debilitating shingles unless chicken pox was contracted, usually decades
earlier.  My husband caught chicken pox when he was 30 years old.  It nearly
killed him, and I don't exaggerate one bit.  It left him with an eternal
itch along the same nerve line that shingles likes to inhabit.  Would he
have opted for a vaccine if one had been available?  It's a no-brainer. Some
autoimmune disorders are believed to be triggered by viruses.  That's the
case with my son's juvenile rheumatoid arthritis which followed a viral
infection.  Ask me if I would have spared his suffering if that had been
possible.  Ask him what his pain level is on any given day.

There's probably a lot more that we don't know about the interaction of our
bodies with the external world than what there is that we do know of it.
With *ALL* medicine (no matter how seemingly benign or risky) there's the
benefit to risk ratio that must be considered.  --And then all we can do is
hope for the best when the decision is made.

I guess I've earned a swat for being OT.  I'll go eat some walnuts now.

Theola