[orthodoc]

Measles is a horrible disease.Its transmission is airborne, meaning that if you're in the same room with someone who's shedding virus, or if you enter the room that person left 30 minutes ago, you'll get it. Measles kills. It also causes SSPE, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is Latin for your brain just died - although the rest of you didn't. It also causes blindness.

Mumps is painful and miserable in kids (besides reading the literature, I had it), but in males it causes orchitis. Which means inflammation of the testes, leading to scarring and inability to produce sperm.

Pertussis kills, period. It's a bad actor. I had it too, fortunately when I was old enough to just cough myself blue in the face and then throw up for weeks on end. Did I lose weight and fail to thrive? You bet. But I was one of the lucky ones that didn't die of hypoxia.

Chicken pox are miserable for small kids, and serious for a minority. They're serious for older kids, though - think viral encephalitis, the possibility of never regaining normal neurological function - and, if nothing else, they leave scars at that point, a bit like small smallpox scars. Not funny. In susceptible adults, chicken pox is a virulent, serious disease that has complications in the majority. In pregnant women, chicken pox is an unmitigated disaster.

All three vaccines are necessary because we need herd immunity. The more of us that are immune, the lower the chance that the disease will manage to propagate in our population.

Jim, I'm sorry to hear about the death of Dawn's child, but SIDS has NO association with vaccines. I understand that it would be an easy association to make in this instance, but it's not true, any more than saying that roosters cause the sun to rise by crowing.

The coming tragedy will be the resurgence of these truly awful diseases as more and more people refuse vaccines, seeing no need for them because they have no experience with the diseases due to pre-existing herd immunity, and they've fallen prey to the downside of the internet: charlatans whose heads are up their asses, preaching doom and quoting (unsubstantiated) anecdotes as a scare tactic, without any substantiated proof of their assertions. These charlatans should be held accountable for every vaccine-preventable death and life disaster that occurs as a result of their deliberate perpetration of falsehood.

Vaccination was one of the immense steps forward for the human race. And now, because it was SO successful, many are declaring that we have nothing to fear from the diseases it prevents, and making it the scapegoat for problems that have other origins.