Roald Dahl's Heartbreaking Take on Vaccines

[Hekate]

30. It's easy to "forget" what you weren't taught. Public health issues desperately need to be curricula

...in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. Public Health information at age-appropriate levels should be taught in co-ordination with science classes, history classes, and civics classes. Literature (English classes anyone?) is replete with first-person accounts of great epidemics of the past, and fictionalized accounts by authors like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain that are based on their personal experiences and are enough to break a heart of stone.

Furthermore, doctors of all specialties (most especially OB/GYNs and pediatricians) should be instructed to ask their patients if they and their children have been vaccinated, and to instruct them in its importance.

It wasn't just being born at the right time that makes me know and remember such things. I've always been an independent reader, and for whatever reason this is a subject that impressed me early on. I read the Little House books in elementary school; the whole family came down with malaria, but didn't know its source. I was only a few years older when I read Mrs. Mike, with the unforgettable and matter-of-fact statement from a slightly older woman to the young bride as they passed by the town graveyard: "That was my first family," in reference to the recurring waves of epidemics that swept off so many children.

But anyway -- not everyone is you or me, which is why I think the subject needs to be taught, and not left to the chance memories of older folks nobody is listening to any more....