More than 100 people in 14 states were reported to have measles last month, with most cases linked to exposure to the disease at Disneyland from December 15 to December 20. President Obama urged parents to make sure their children are vaccinated. And yet three potential Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election have suggested in recent days that parents should have a choice in whether children should be vaccinated.
When we are not exposed to the suffering that childhood infectious diseases can cause or didn’t experience them ourselves, we as a society tend to forget just how dangerous they can be.
In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes Foundation. Children and adults everywhere collected dimes to raise money for the development of a polio vaccine. There was such fear about the disease that children were kept from going to community swimming pools and parks. Their way of life was changed by the disease.
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