The anti-vaccination crowd makes my blood rise sometimes. It's all well and good that people don't want to vaccinate their children...but then segregate them from the rest of the world and don't inflict their germy little selves on the rest of us. As a T1 Diabetic, my immune system isn't always 100%, and infections and illnesses take much longer to die down for me. And down time means no work, which means no money, which I don't really have the wiggle room to lose. So while those precious little non antibiotic all organic non vaccinators sit around and say that the body is meant to fight off disease, I'm down with the flu or worse and paying out the nose for it.
To me, vaccination isn't so much about the self, it's about others (the elderly, the young, the immunosupressed). NPR's This American Life had a story about a group of parents who didn't get the MMR vaccine for their kids...then one got the measles. Measles is infectious for up to 2 hrs after the person has left the room. A whole group of children too young to be vaccinated ended up getting the disease because of those kids just being in the same store, and then had to be quarantined/hospitalized.
The British writer Dr. Ben Goldsmith has written pretty extensively on the origins of the MMR=Autism misunderstanding.
More from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8268302.stm
And from BBC wayyyy back in 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/68947.stm
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