Your Social Responsibility

The election is tomorrow and I have heard so much about fulfilling your civic duty these last few days, really enough to make me want to vomit, on the next person that tells me to vote. I thought that I would follow that theme, since everyone seems particularly receptive now… so here I am stepping back on to my wonderful soapbox, yes you know what this post is going to be about.


So I am sure all of you wonderful readers are all painfully aware of my stance on vaccinations… and well honestly if I didn’t feel this way I wouldn’t be a responsible health educator, but that isn’t the point. So I recently had the privilege of watching the first part of Rx for Survival… if you haven’t had that privilege I highly recommend you rent it… you know for date night… movie night… or whatever… it is great… very educational. Anyway one quote stuck out to me… I wrote it down to post on this blog (yes I do think about you my wonderful readers)
“So when we give vaccines its’ both because we want to protect our children, but also because we have a social contract that in living in this society we try to protect other children.”

I thought this quote was powerful… the doctor that said it was one of the leaders of the smallpox eradication project… so he obviously felt strongly about the topic.
This last week I was able to go to the annual APHA (American Public Health Association) conference, which was amazing, but while I was there I attended 2 “immunization” sessions, and really I don’t think it hits you how amazing vaccines are or how lucky we are to have them until you sit in a room with the men and women who helped make smallpox a thing of the past. Really we take this technology for granted, we opt out, “forget” to vaccinate, and fail to recognize the miraculous power these drug have… so readers here is my final push (for tonight at least) for vaccinations… sure there are risks associated with the procedure but there are risks associated with everything and in this case the benefits far out weigh the risks… do the right thing and vaccinate yourself and your children. Just in case you aren’t sure what vaccines you should have received to this point or which vaccines your child needs I did pick up some wonderfully handy immunization schedules at APHA, just looking out for you.