In article , "Dee D. Flint"
writes:

Yes many people are unaware of the death rates from some of these
diseases.
For example, the death rate among children who caught whooping cough was
50%.

I didn't know it was that bad.


Yup. Like you, most people don't know how high the fatality rate was. The
reason is simple. Whooping cough, the Pertussis in DPT, was a very serious
disease. However very, very few people have ever seen a case. It was
pretty much brought under control 50 years or more ago. People have seen
the wide variety of stuff lumped under "croup" and have mis-applied the term
whooping cough to various severe coughs but they are not the same thing.

Same for "flu" and "influenza". Etc.

I recall a documentary about Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was born in the year 1900.
At that time, the death rate for American babies was 10% in the first year -
that is, 1 in 10 babies born alive in the USA were dead before their first
birthday. I don't know the exact rate today but it's a lot lower.

There is also a lot of bad science out there involving immunizations. For
example, there are still folks trying to sell the idea that immunizations
are
somehow a cause of autism, even though repeated scientific studies have
shown
no causality. There *is* a sort of correlation in that the first
definitive
signs of autism are usually observed about the age of many common
immunizations.


Even if there were a causal effect, the odds of this happening are so very
much lower than the odds of dying should the child contract Whooping Cough
that it's far better to get the immunizations.

But that requires understanding the nature of risk and the consequences of the
various choices. And some math.

73 es stay healthy de Jim, N2EY