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For anyone to even ask the title question about the need for ongoing vaccination in the United States is troubling in itself. It bears witness to a failure of the health care professions to properly educate the public to the facts about vaccine and communicable disease and issues of immunity in general.

Sadly, it also demonstrates the willingness of people to accept as fact hyperbole and faulty assumptions masquerading as scientific fact. The vaccine resisters include some thoughtful and educated people, and some of their concerns are quite legitimate, but many of the loudest protestors have little or no scientific training and obviously do not understand core concepts in preventative medicine or immune system function.

One of the strangest of the logically impaired arguments is the notion that the immune system is damaged by too much exposure to vaccines. Without getting into the extremely complex workings of the human immune system, some reflection on the alternatives anti-vaccinators propose based in common sense reveals the problem. Instead of immune systems needing to respond to killed or weakened forms of communicable diseases viruses or bacteria, not vaccinating means the risk of exposure to the full strength of these microbes!

If there is sanity in choosing to "burden" the immune system with the most virulent pathogens rather than attenuated ones that still produce protection, it is certainly well concealed. Other rabid protestors claim instead that children "need" to have the illnesses once called "the usual childhood diseases" such as rubella, mumps, measles and chicken pox to be develop a healthy immune system. Some claim things as bizarre as a need to get measles and other illness to "purge fetal toxins" which no legitimate science has ever shown to exist.

Such arguments without fail will minimize the severity of these illnesses and stress how most children have mild, short lived symptoms. Severe complications and fatalities are cheerfully brushed aside with the information that "most" children will not be permanently harmed by mumps or measles. Missing as well will be the problem of a lifelong risk of shingles after having even the mildest case of chicken pox. Shingles sufferers are unlikely to consider their severe pain as something to ignore.

Rubella is in fact almost always minor in reasonably healthy children, but can cause devastation birth defects when contracted during pregnancy but this is also dismissed with a suggestion to deliberately infect

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