Sunday, November 18, 2007

Want Kids Immunized? Threaten the Parents With Jail

Student are supposed to get vaccinated against certain diseases. But what if the parents don't take care of it? Make it costly for them not to, like sending them to jail. Here is the intro to one of the articles:

"UPPER MARLBORO, MD. — The threat of jail time injected a little motivation into scores of parents who lined up around the courthouse Saturday to get their children vaccinated on the spot or prove they've already had the shots.

It was one of the strongest efforts yet by a U.S. school system to ensure that youngsters are immunized, upsetting some parents who grumbled that Prince George's County officials went too far and irking opponents of mass vaccinations, who demonstrated outside.

Two months into the school year, county officials realized more than 2,000 students didn't have the vaccinations required to attend class. So Circuit Court Judge C. Philip Nichols ordered parents in a letter to appear at the courthouse Saturday or risk 10 days in jail."

You can read about it here and here and here

2 comments:

champ said...

I am not sure if this is going a little over board. Those parents probably have some constraints as to why they couldn't get the shots done. I do know one thing, Jail is motivator. It could mess up ones lively hood. For example, loss of employment and a jail stay on the permanent record.

Anonymous said...

Childhood immunization is being done to protect the whole population against disease, it is not about the individual; it is about protecting everyone. Our generation has been so lucky, we have not seen polio or small pox go through our populations and take the elderly and the very young. I thank the public health officials who try to keep us safe.

This is the list of vaccines recommended by the CDC for children 0-6.
Which of these diseases would you like to be running around, infecting the population?

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/child/2007/child-schedule-color-print.pdf

Hepatitis B1
Rotavirus2
Diphtheria,Tetanus,Pertussis3
Haemophilus influenzae type b4
Pneumococcal5
Inactivated Poliovirus
Influenza6
Measles, Mumps, Rubella7
Varicella8
Hepatitis A9
Meningococcal10