Assessing risk and the anti-vax position

TPP grew up when measles and polio were real threats. Kids died of measles too. Every one of my grade school classrooms had at  least one student who had some form of paralysis from polio, so when the Salk vaccine became available parents wasted no time in getting their kids vaccinated. Polio has basically disappeared and the measles was almost eradicated in the USA 15 years ago and hasn't been a serious health problem for at least twice as long. This means that living within a well vaccinated herd the risk of these diseases seems very low, very distant, so avoiding vaccinations does not seem to place you at any risk. The recent measles out break shows how wrong that is in our global community where it is pretty easy to get to places where measles still exists. Then when the vector returns home, and visits some high traffic public place, you get an out-break of measles. In the safety of our herd, other risks are perceived to be greater like the discredited association of vaccinations and autism. This is a case of coincidence - the onset of autism often appears at about the same age as childhood immunizations and people naturally sought to find cause and effect relationships. This is an easy error in judgement to make, the result of only counting hits and not the way more numerous misses. Humans are quite bad at assessing risk; people fearful of flying think nothing of driving their cars although the latter is a far greater risk. In spite of the actual data, people see driving as a lower risk because they are in control. TPP gets parents terrified of letting their college age students take rain forest field trips because of the "dangers", but yours truly is much more worried about them the one night they spend in a city. But now the situation is becoming dire as the herd immunity has fallen below a safe level especially for something as easily vectored as measles. Now the decision to avoid vaccination for your children is no longer personal and no longer low risk; it affects the general public and your kids are at greater risk especially if they travel. This is why states used to require proof of vaccination before you could attend public schools; people make poor decisions that affect others. A good case can be made for not allowing unvaccinated people to leave the country, not because they are at greater risk catching a disease, which they are, but because they become vectors reintroducing an eradicated disease. 

Anti-vaccination people ignore real health threat

As a school kid in the 50s we all had friends and classmates variously hobbled by polio. It was definitely the health scourge of our day, then along came a polio vaccine and now hardly anyone ever thinks about polio any more. Some few also died of the disease. So the Phactor is wondering when and where the next outbreak will be in the USA? Polio is not gone from the Earth, and all it will take is one non-vaccinated person, the unfortunate offspring of irrational parents, to travel abroad and bring the disease back, and then an outbreak will occur among all those non-vaccinated kids, who were up until then protected by the vast majority who got vaccinated. This is happening right now with measles, a not completely inconsequential childhood disease. In the "old" days if you did not have an up to date vaccination record, you could not attend public school. Now 2% of all kids in California are not being vaccinated. So when the inevitable happens, everyone should just say you could have, you should have, but you didn't. It's all on you. Tough. Clearly it's in the best interest of the country for the USA to restrict overseas travel of non-vaccinated people, and they should be the ones clamoring most loudly for the restriction. Now of course some small chance of vectoring a disease can also come from visiting persons, so anti-vaccers should realize the potential risk and their only protection is too become extremely xenophobic, stay at home, don't travel, don't send you kids to school, and don't socialize, or face the consequences of your actions.