There was an articles in my CNN Health News that I initially thought was going to be a rant, but was actually thoughtful and interesting.

Vaccinations are a subject that have been a hot button issue for me for awhile.

More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children, seeing it as a personal choice.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Vaccines are central to public health. Yes, they provide immunity to the individuals who are vaccinated, but they also provide herd immunity, which protects the community at large, including individuals who are incapable of being vaccinated, or for whom vaccines don’t work: individuals with immune disorders or with suppressed immune systems.

Herd immunity is actually an interesting thing. If you have 100 people, and none of them are vaccinated, when an illness hits, the illness will spread through the populations affecting everyone except with individuals with some sort of natural immunity.

However, if those 98 of those individuals are immunized, the remaining two individuals are also protected, because those around them will not get sick.

But if fewer individuals are immunized, say, 75%, then the disease may be able to get a foothold in the community, and those two individuals who cannot be immunized are now at serious risk for getting ill. And it is those individuals who can’t be immunized or for whom immunization isn’t effect, those are the individuals who are most likely to be severely affected by the disease.

So when 23 of those 100 individuals refuse to be vaccinated, they may actually cause the death of the two individuals who were unable to be immunized. Of course they may cause their own serious illness or death as well.

But that’s the point of public health.

And interestingly, parents refusing to vaccinated their children was not what the article was primarily about.

What the article was promoting was for parents who had concerns to talk to their pediatricians about alternate vaccination schedules.

Right now infants and children tend to multiple vaccinations in a short period of time, including single vaccines for multiple illnesses (like DTaP and MMR) I received the DTaP vaccine last year, and I have to say it was pretty miserable. I had no problems the last time I received a Tetanus vaccine, but the combination vaccine was harsh and made me pretty miserable.

I think physicians are in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position here. When the vaccines are spread out, children are more likely to miss vaccines. But giving children multiple vaccines at once makes the children miserable, and may cause problems in limited individuals.

It seems like pediatricians should be able to offer parents a choice. Because vaccination is something that is mandatory for a reason. And doctors should be willing to work with parents to allay fears for their children, and if that is using an alternate vaccine schedule, then lets make it as easy as possible for those parents.

Of course