While we're on the subject, how many pro-vaccers didn't get their flu shot?

[SheilaT]

101. My story is remarkably similar to yours.

And I was even born in New York State!

I wouldn't actually call myself sickly as a child, but I likewise recall being sick a great deal, especially the year I went to kindergarten. I also spent the first six years of my life in a low-income housing development. Lots of kids. Lots of stuff went around. I got it all. These days? I last had a cold some five years ago.

Our immune systems are such that we're more or less supposed to get a whole host of diseases early on and if we survive them, we're permanently immune. I am not about to suggest we go back to the pre-vaccination era, not in the least. The vaccinations are truly wonderful. Even if the traditional childhood diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox) really were as benign as I tend to think of them, it is nice not to have to go through the sheer inconvenience of nursing children through them. But yes, vaccinate.

Here's another little factoid most people don't know. Smallpox had evolved a far milder form, known as variola minor in the late 19th century -- in two different parts of the world, I believe -- which was as contagious, but far less serious (in that people didn't get as sick in the first place), and far less deadly. Something like a 3% death rate. It also did not leave scars. It was in the process of replacing variola minor right at the time universal vaccination against smallpox was coming about in this country. Had the smallpox vaccine not already been developed, that disease would have simply become one of the common childhood diseases, at least until a vaccine was developed. A while back I read a fascinating book about the last smallpox epidemic in this country, and the battle to get people to be vaccinated. One huge problem was that at the turn of the 20th century, smallpox vaccines often were contaminated, and people actually died because they got something else (I'm thinking it was tetanus, but I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly) from the vaccine.