Do you know why parents send their kids to "pox parties"? It's not because they want to see their kids scratching and scarring themselves for a week. No parent wants their child to get ill, but they'll routinely arrange to have their kids get some diseases that make them miserable for days at a time. Seems odd, doesn't it?

The reason is simple. In childhood, these diseases are annoyances. You get all spotty, you scratch for a few days, you go back to normal. In adulthood, these diseases kill. Rubella in pregnant women causes birth defects and miscarriages. Three-quarters of chickenpox deaths are in adults, despite the overwhelming majority of cases being among children. Measles kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, even with vaccines available(though this is an improvement, it was pushing a million a decade ago).

Intentionally inflicting diseases upon your child to make them miserable may have been a good way to save them from worse when we were growing up and medicine hadn't advanced as far as it has today. But we have better options now, and lionizing a practice born out of brutal necessity does a terrible disservice to our children.

I remember when the family of five boys down the street fron us all got the measles. They were even be out playing, their bodies covered with measels. We kids didn't think anything of it, nor did the adults. Noone complained. Noone reported them. They were never quarantined. None of them died, they got over it. It never, ever made the news.

Why? BECAUSE IT WASN'T A BIG DEAL! That's just they way it was back then (1970's).

If that happend today it would be a lockdown situ. The ped would call the school nurse. The school nurse would call the local health department, The Health department would call the state DPH. (Maybe the state would notify CDC or Homeland Security who knows?) The kids would be sent home and quarantined indefinetly. The next morning you maybe even read a news story about the deadly measles outbreak.

I'm much more worried about the paranoia that exists today than the actual disease.

effalumps and woozles...it's very confoozled...(from Winnie the Pooh!)
and how about Velveteen Rabbit- our very first video over 20 yrs ago! the little boy was sick and in quarantine, and his stuffed animals were sent to Toy Heaven :)
and some other cartoon character had the "weasles" but I forgot who that was! ahhh, the good ol'days...

Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks; tough kids, sissy kids, EVEN KIDS WITH CHICKENPOX...love hotdogs...

Jill, 19 kids and counting - I have watched in total awwww. How come they can have so many healthy kids and I cannot even have two? They do vaccinate though because the last little baby girl they gave birth to,was really sick, slow to get out of the hospital, very low birth weight. They vaccinated her right on the show. What they were I don't know, they did not say.

Why ramp up the fear level of (autism) right now? Is it for back to school doctor's visits, so as to (de)crease uptake? The media is in a frenzy with dire (autism) warnings, much like the color coded terror alerts that popped up everytime the current administration needed a voter boost before the 2004 election. Using fear to (avoid) a product is as old as Cleopatra's eyeliner (which prevented eye infections and disease.) Let's not be blinded by the technique.

I always think it's odd when people say things like, "Nobody alive today remembers how terrible these diseases were!" My generation grew up with these diseases! I'm a bit too young to remember polio, and smallpox was before my time, but the rest were routine childhood illnesses when I was growing up. And chicken pox was routine until about ten years ago.

If we could prevent all these illnesses safely, if adverse vaccine reactions were truly rare, and if we develped a full understanding of how to minimize and treat adverse reactions, that would be one thing. Sure it would be great to prevent these illnesses if the trade-off were not epidemic levels of autism, IBD, seizure disorders, asthma, severe allergies, bipolar, ADHD, diabetes... But to exaggerate the dangers of these illnesses in order to justify not even acknowledging the down side of vaccines is just propaganda.

I caught an episode of "19 kids and counting" on TLC where almost ALL of the Duggar kids had chicken pox. I am unsure if Mrs. Duggar vaccinates her children or not, but it was no big deal in their home. They were controlling the itching with anti itch creams and fever with Benadryl, right there on National TV. They talked about how yeah, it was annoying, but it was ok b/c now they had natural immunity. :)

Still have that Arthur book - one of the special things about autism is that your kids still like a lot of the same things they liked ten years ago.
And the Brady Bunch episode where all of the kids get the Measles at the same time is a classic! The parents are only mildly concerned. No one called 911, no one went crazy with panic. Alice didn't even break a sweat! It was just another childhood illness to get through with a little TLC, then life went back to normal. Now if all the Brady kids regressed into autism at the same time, now THAT would be a scarey show!