Vaccinate kids and ignore the ignorant

Here we go again.

Whenever a new school year starts, so does the conversation about immunizing kids from various diseases. And wham! The minute you mention vaccines, controversial fur flies.

Idaho leads the nation, if "leads" is the appropriate word, in having the most kindergartners going to school without the required immunizations. Nearly 12 percent of Kootenai County kindergartners last year had an immunization exemption on file for religious, medical or philosophical reasons. The median percentage nationally was 1.6 percent.

The dilemma was outlined in a Press story last week and, almost immediately, reader comments rained down. Illegal immigrants are to blame for most diseases in school; people should get their kids out of these unsafe institutions and home-school them or put them in faith-based schools; and of course, the drumbeat of vaccines-lead-to-autism echoed through the Internet jungle.

Parents, you can listen to the fearful and the fearfully uninformed, or you can listen to our country's best medical experts. At the Mayo Clinic, here's what the experts say about immunizing your kids:

"Childhood vaccines protect children from a variety of serious or potentially fatal diseases, including diphtheria, measles, meningitis, polio, tetanus and whooping cough. If these diseases seem uncommon - or even unheard of - it's usually because these vaccines are doing their job."

One of the most insidious claims about vaccinations - that they can cause autism in children - gets no quarter from Mayo.

"Vaccines do not cause autism," Mayo's doctors write on the institution's website, mayoclinic.org. "Despite much controversy on the topic, researchers haven't found a connection between autism and childhood vaccines. In fact, the original study that ignited the debate years ago has been retracted.

"Although signs of autism may appear at about the same time children receive certain vaccines - such as the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine - this is simply a coincidence."

You'll get similarly sound science from every other credible medical source including the Centers for Disease Control. If you invalidate the CDC's data because it's a governmental entity, you're doing so at great peril.

Please don't think you're being responsible by avoiding vaccines for your children. Even if they're home-schooled, they likely come into contact with other people, adults and children who then are exposed to the disease your child might be carrying - or vice versa. Even if you think you have the right to allow your child to get very sick or die, you certainly don't have that right for others.

Vaccinate your kids and give them their best chance to live and learn.