noelrosie

Why indeed? For the record, I am a firm supporter of vaccination, but have met many over the years who refused to give their kids the MMR jab. The controversy about its safety kicked off at the time my children were of an age to have it, and after much soul-searching I had them both done. Glad I did, especially now that the results of the initial scare-mongering study have been found to be flawed.

bil

Only one disease, to the best of my knowledge has been effectively eradicated and that's small pox.

The rest we just keep at bay.

Domino

having followed this thread from the beginning, the one thing that keeps coming back to me is the nightmare that has been explored in a couple of television progs where a bug gets loose on a world unprepared for it and destroys most of civilisation.

countries including Britain, probably Spain, keep samples of bugs and diseases for use in biological warfare......something that should be explored in another thread, but I believe there are people out there who are mad enough to actually do it.........

bil

Don't need a nutter, all we need is for a flu virus to roll six sixes and enter the viral megadeath Hall of Fame.

Domino

so is that what killed the dinosaurs (the beasties not the ones on the forum) ?

but then if that is the case it was selective as we still have some of their descendents wandering around, even if we are doing all we can to eradicate them as well

bil

No. Dinosaurs died out before mammals were the dominant life form. I have no idea when the flu virus evolved as a respiratory infection of mammals, and its ancestral chain stretches back just like ours, but we are certain that it was established in our livestock, and when in the middle ages we lived cheek by jowl with our livestock, it had all the opportunities it needed to add us as a useful host.

Rosemary

Hey who are you calling a dinosaur, I might be big ugly and old but I have feelings.
Graham

bil

I love the way that dinosaur is used as a term for something outdated. They ruled the earth for MILLIONS of years (We've been around for only a tiny % of that) and we are in danger of wiping ourselves out.

Pollyana

I never had chicken pox, also never had a vaccination against it, don't even know if it was around in the 60s when I was a kid. Just suddenly came down with shingles badly during my first year in Australia.

I did have the first part of the whooping cough vaccine as a baby - which resulted in me turning blue and ceasing to breathe. My mum always told me I was just very sick with it, it was only when I emigrated and got hold of my medical records that I found out I had actually had to be resucitated.

lynnxa

yes, I thought you could get shingles without having had chickenpox

sounds like you were a kid at the same time as me - before there were vaccines against the most common childhood illnesses........did your mum & her mates have 'chickenpox' 'mumps' & 'measles' parties - so that you could get them all out of the way before you started school - if the neighbour's kid caught one of them, the entire street went round to play.........


I never did manage to catch mumps......

Lorna at Vicenza

One of my kids was due the MMR in Italy when all the hoo-ha was going on about it in the UK. I wan't following the news properly and probably only got the scare mongers side of things and if Blair had vaccinated leo or whatever his name is. Then I found out that in Italy the vaccine was split anyway and wasn't MMR but MR or MM (can't remember now) and the last and third part was given separately and months later.

That's shocking Poll. Imagine discovering that later in life.

bil

You must, somewhere, somehow have been infected with chicken pox, even if it was so mild that you didn't know it.

Shingles is the resurgence of a previous infection, not a disease in its own right.

Lorna at Vicenza

Maybe Polly had the adult version of chickenpox, never having had chickenpox as a child. Shingles is more common in older folks and Polly's not that old.
Chickenpox in adults is often also worse than in children.

dmu

Back to the original theme, and as a matter of interest, are children in Spain who haven't been vaccinated at all but accepted into school, allowed to go on school trips?
I ask, because children in France whose vaccinations aren't for some reason up to date, aren't allowed to go on a day-trip, let alone a week in a foreign country, with their class. Not so much because of the risk of catching children's diseases, but tetanos following an injury.
Just wondered....

bil

I just can't understand how you could get shingles, which is the chickenpox virus already in your body, hidden in the nervous system AFTER BEING DEFEATED BY YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM.

So, to get shingles, first you have to get chicken pox.

I'm pretty sure that any so called 'childhood disease' is more serious whe caught as an adult.