And we're back from the holiday break...I was catching up on episodes of a couple shows last night, and one of them was last week's episode of Private Practice. Originally I was planning on half watching the show and half getting caught up on e-mail. A couple minutes into the show, though, I knew that wasn't going to be happening - because Private Practice apparently decided to mix things up a bit and tackle vaccines and autism.
(If you want to watch this episode it's on ABC's website here. Spoiler alert going forward...)
The short plot summary is that the mom decided not to have her two younger children immunized after the oldest one developed autism. The middle son ends up with measles, and the doctor wants to immunize the youngest son. The mom is refusing the vaccine, eventually the doctor vaccinates the youngest son against her wishes, and the middle son ends up dying. Yikes.
The only thing that could have probably made this more interesting would have been if this was the season finale, so everyone on both sides of the vaccines-autism debate could have argued all summer long. Alas. If there is one issue that (to me) would be interesting to track over time, in terms of the public's knowledge and attitudes, this would be the one. Perhaps a research project to come...
And kudos to the Private Practice folk for doing a nice job tackling a tough issue.
2 comments:
How is it a "nice job" when they have used emotional blackmail to convince parents to vaccinate in the hope of preventing a childs' death?
Where is the science they so strongly require non-vaccinating parents have to back up their evidence of autism from vaccines?
This was an episode where they truly demonstrated the fear they have that parents are realising that vaccines are harmful & not beneficial to their children.
While they didn't get into it in the show (from what I can remember, this was a few months ago), I would guess that at least one component of the pro-vaccine argument would probably be herd immunity. The Wikipedia link (here) was the first one to pop up in Google, though there are plenty of other resources out there. This isn't my area of expertise, and I'm pretty sure there is other science to back up the benefits of vaccines, but that's at least one bit of science.
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