Why children should get that measles vaccination! It is NOT a disease of the past.

Elegran I do agree wholeheartedly. I had measles, along with my siblings, when I was a child and I also saw one of my friends become severely brain damaged and blind as a result of this dreadful illness.

One of my children had seizures among other, ongoing, health problems, so the hospital advised me that the MMR was contraindicated for her even though I'd had all of my other children vaccinated. Unfortunately it was at a time when a lot of parents were choosing NOT to have their children immunised and my daughter was exposed to infection and caught the measles. To see her already frail little body wracked with pain was heartbreaking and at one point we really believed she was going to die. I admit that at the time I was very cross with the parents who CHOSE not to get their children vaccinated and in doing so exposed my poor daughter to infection.

Absolutely agree that children should be vaccinated, measles can be so serious. Dd1 had the jab, there was a scare at the time about it not being not being suitable for certain children but the criteria didn’t apply to her so we went ahead. It did make her quite poorly for a few days and I did wonder if I’d done the right thing.
She later, aged 11, contracted measles and was really unwell with it, GP said at the time that it would have been worse had she not had the immunisation. I was shocked at the impact it had on a fit and otherwise healthy child. Within weeks of recovering she became asthmatic and went onto suffer awful skin allergies which lasted right into young adulthood and caused her terrible discomfort not to mention embarrassment. It seemed that measles somehow upset the whole balance of her body. I think people easily forget how devasting measles, and actually chickenpox too, can be and become complacent about immunisations. Like grannyA it makes me cross!

We have forgotten how serious childhood illnesses can be since the advent of universal vaccination in the UK and have become complacent as other posters have said. I worked in the NHS during the MMR scare and there was so much mis information circulated mainly by the popular press that many parents were too scared to vaccinate.

And there are still parents who remember the scare, but not that the "research" that caused it was discredited years ago. What a lot of damage can be done by half-baked theories pushed and publicised until they are believed as proven fact.

www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452
"Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross."