How would clean and well fed children fare without vaccine?

[cosmicalstorm]

We were talking about vaccination over dinner, one lady mentioned that she hated them. I replied that many children used to die before they existed, to which she replied something like "Well they didn't have proper sanitation and they were starving and poor back then and thats the real reason for blabla...".

I guess there is a difference, but how big is it? How would kids fare without vaccine provided they were well fed and so on?

[Spoonist]

http://zooey.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/m ... d-belgium/
http://pediatrics.about.com/od/measles/ ... breaks.htm

If you are well fed the risk of dying decreases. But you'll still get sick with all the trauma of that, like sterility, pneumonia, etc.

If you have proper sanitation you won't get the yearly dysenteria outbreaks.

If you have proper hygine you'd not have as many "contact" dieseases, but aerial diseases would still spread.

For stupid people like her though there is no vaccination that would help. Just ask her how many she knows that have had regular colds, influenca and stomach diseases. Lots of deadly and maiming diseases use the same vectors as those, so if they get through they would too without vaccination.

[PeZook]

So America didn't have proper hygiene and sanitation when it was being ravaged by polio in the 1940s and 1950s? I guess all these people lining up to get their shots were just the poor and unwashed hippies

There's plenty of diseases that spread through, say, oral contact that are pretty much unaffected by sanitation, like rotaviruses and staph (since people kiss even when clean. Probably they kiss MORE when they're clean ). Others obviously are, like typhoid which was nearly eradicated without a huge vaccination campaign like what destroyed polio.

[someone_else]

Depends from the illness you are infecting them with. And on the complications (sometimes the infections team up, the first weakens you and opens the doors to everyone else, like say measles or flu).

For example, tetanus will kill them regardless of their situation, unless they are vaccined. And tetanus is relatively easy to take if you do stuff outdoors.

Pneumonia is a complication of flu and again is lethal unless vaccinated.

There is a long list of other random illnesses that just like the above will require a major effort to be treated after you are ill (=large money expenditure if you are in a country like US), various require to take shit that makes meth look healthy.
Or at the very least to take wide spectrum antibiotics that fuck up your intestine's microbic fauna, which is usually not a good thing to do (as playing with any ecosystem is).

a list of such illnensses, from WHO

But yeah, the magic pill that cures is generally more sought after than the magic pill that prevents the illness, even if it is worse under any respect.

Also tell this trashhead that due to her kin the number of cases of people that get preventable diseases is rising And that's in places where you cannot say there are unwashed unfed kids.
(please note, the article says "Of the 118 cases, 47 (40%) resulted in hospitalization. Nine patients had pneumonia, but none had encephalitis and none died. All but one hospitalized patient were unvaccinated. The vaccinated patient reported having received 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine and was hospitalized for observation only. Hospitalization rates were highest among infants and children aged <5 years (52%), but rates also were high among children and adults aged ≥5 years (33%).", so that can be stupid to do if you have to ask the insurance to pay for the cures or doing so on your own, instead of paying a single vaccine).

[Alyrium Denryle]

We were talking about vaccination over dinner, one lady mentioned that she hated them. I replied that many children used to die before they existed, to which she replied something like "Well they didn't have proper sanitation and they were starving and poor back then and thats the real reason for blabla...".

I guess there is a difference, but how big is it? How would kids fare without vaccine provided they were well fed and so on?

This person is an idiot. Small pox did not care about sanitation, or economic status. Neither does influenza, Polio, Tetanus, Rabies, Measles, the Mumphs, Rubella...

The 1917/1918 flu pandemic killed between 3 and 6% of the world's population in a single year. Smallpox killed more people in the 20th century than every war in human history COMBINED. None of these diseases care about sanitation. Being well fed increases your odds of survival, but for a disease like smallpox, the mortality rate is still 35%.

Influenza kills 36 thousand people in the US every year, and that is without a really bad pandemic strain in almost 100 years. If something like H5N1 avian flu becomes pandemic, mortality rate will be 50%.

Tell this woman to learn what the fuck she is talking about before she stops breathing through her mouth and sucks in the drool long enough speak.

[Mayabird]

Since she doesn't sound like the type of person who would respond to logical arguments...



Dirty and starving, eh? Yeah, I'm sure that's what did it.