The anti-vaccination mindset demonstrated by so many ill informed parents shows how far respect for reason and evidence has fallen. Any crank who can post a conspiracy theory online is acknowledged by much of today's media and the propaganda is eagerly swallowed by the gullible.

Meanwhile those few with genuinely compromised immune systems, cancer patients, the elderly and unprotected children suffer the consequences.

It's the worst form of selfishness, as Tim said, it's really another form of child abuse. People like Meryl Dorey should be held accountable for the damage they have done.

Amongst the many tropes of the anti-vax movement is their misunderstanding of the epidemiology of whooping cough vaccination and infection. They like to use this example because the seroconversion rate and longevity of immunity are not as good as for - say - Hepatitis B or Rubella (German Measles).

Well, it absolute terms, it's true that there are more cases of whooping cough amongst the vaccinated than the unvaccinated (although the vaccinated generally have milder disease). But, what is the denominator (ie the PROPORTION of each group - vaxed and unvaxed - getting the illness?). Well, because of the relatively high rate of vaccination in our community, it turns out that the unvaccinated are contracting whooping cough at five times the rate of the vaccinated. And that's for one of the less effective vaccines.

Let's consider this: why would virtually the entire population of early childhood nurses, Neonatal ICU nurses and doctors and paediatricians - all who understand child health and dedicate their lives to the health care of children - gang up to hide the truth about immunisation? Or are they all just not very clever? The evidence would suggest that neither conspiracy theory is correct.

While my brothers had their children vaccinated, my sister, an intelligent, educated person, didn't. She had read the stuff against vaccination, thought harm was possible, after all it odesn't seem a natural thing to do to a little baby, and decided she would just try in every natural way (diet, outdoor activities etc) to raise very healthy children.

I think people with those views don't worry about adults being vaccinated, so perhaps the place to start is with adults. If all adults were vaccinated maybe, eventually, babies wouldn't need to be?

That said, I'm surely not, and for the simple reason that I haven't got a clue whatever or whenever I have been vaccinated for. If we had universal medical records with this sort of info in them, and got a reminder to get a booster when you should have one, I almost certainly would just go along and have it done.

One way of settling the anti-vaccination debate, which is not about just the individual rights of anti-vaccs parents but those of everyone else as well, is to hold the unvaccinated and/or their parents financially responsible for every outbreak and every death: their choice is someone else's consequence. And it's a funny thing but I've never found anyone with the least clue about medical research and epidemiology who was in any way shape or form defensive of the anti-vaccs crowd: the defenders seem to me mostly to be from marketing, sales or business backgrounds but think that because they can read a Cochrane or two, they can sound off with authority about meta-analyses and suchlike as if they actually understood the science.

TWO THINGS: I was a nurse in a rural pediatric clinic in Wyoming, USA for many years, and this issue regarding fear of consequences from vaccination was ever present. We recognized that we were working with generations of parents who had never seen these diseases or their consequences. We also realized that parents embraced the anti-vaccination movement with near religious fervor, convinced that they were protecting their children from "big brother" mandates. We did two things to help to educate our families, both based not on fear or attempting to convince them that their fears were groundless, but on accurate information first, and on critical thought. First, the pediatrician put together a spiral bound booklet containing descriptions and pictures of people suffering from the diseases for which we were recommending vaccinations. This was not intended to frighten people, but was presented as a piece of the education component. Several of these booklets were left in the waiting room; they were never presented directly to parents, as we felt that such presentation would be perceived as a scare tactic - the information was simply made available. The second approach was to ask parents to consider relative danger. The specific comparison that I used was seat belts / car seats. I said to parents, "While you realize that, rarely, a child may be injured by being in a car seat or seat belt, you still use them, because you know the odds of them being hurt are much greater without them. Vaccines also have a risk/benefit comparison; the risks of these diseases are much more of a threat than the risk of the vaccines." I saw many moments when parents understood this new way to think about threats to their children. I hope this will be useful information to people looking for practical ways to approach parents without threatening their belief systems.