Okay, All You Esquires, Economists and Wonks....

[purejuice]

...riddle me this. I can sort of understand the more paranoid sovereign Tuskegee experiment reasons people might not want to submit to laws mandating innoculations.

First of all, are there such laws? Must I inoculate my children against measles, pox, and everything else?

Second, is there case law, actual precedents, in which someone has been held liable for spreading or carrying disease?

Comments

[tigerflower]

Some localities and states have laws regarding public school attendance and immunization, yes, but as is the way of such things, it is not uniform in the USA. I seem to recall that the laws are more comprehensive in many other countries.

As for the second, about which I know a bit more: there have been various attempts, the most well known and wide-ranging that I know of being the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts in the UK (1864), which resulted in many hundreds of prostitutes and suspected prostitutes being imprisoned for periods of up to a year at a time in what were known as "Lock Hospitals" for being found (or suspected as) infected with "social disease."

More recently, it's been the case that many countries regard the transmission of disease -- often in practice it ends up being herpes or some other STI -- as part of tort law. HIV transmission, on the other hand, is more commonly treated under criminal law. I know there have been cases in Germany, Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada (the big case I know about there is R. v. Cuerrier, which was in the late 90s sometime if memory serves). The US, predictably, has a lot of conflicting legal stances on the issue and no comprehensive federal case law.

Does this help?

[purejuice]

yes, thank you. i am asking because i have joined OFA and will be working on its platform/messaging task force here in NM. health care access being something i can inform myself upon, and which is a winning political strategery.

[garrity]

You must vax your kids if you want to send them to public schools, or travel internationally, but that's about the extent of the "must." Plenty of people have not vaxed their kids (and that's part of the reason why I got pertussis last winter).

My opinions on this are absolutely inflexible, and I do not debate them any more than I debate evolution vs. creationism. Here goes:

I think it should be criminal not to vax your children with the basics, if they are healthy. The diseases we vax for in childhood can kill, and they can take years off of your life or tank your quality of life. As a premodern social historian, I am acutely aware -- thanks to all those tiny gravestones -- of the benefits of mass vaccination. If you want a more modern cautionary point, take my FiL, who has post-polio syndrome, which is painful and erodes his quality of life as well as his cardiac health. If we take kids away from parents for neglect, the criminality of not vaccinating them for childhood illnesses is a pretty obvious call.

Beyond the otherwise healthy kids who are at risk from childhood illness because their parents are neglecting them, we ought next consider my goddaughter, who must be on a very limited and slow vax schedule now that she has a transplant liver. Her health, and the health of other medically fragile kids, is also at stake, and her docs and parents cannot do things any differently to protect her. So you're neglecting your own children and more or less putting others' kids out to play in traffic, when you refuse to vaccinate. It's utter bullshit.

If you're not allowed to pour your raw sewage into the local drinking water, you should not be allowed to decline vaccination for your children. It amounts to the same thing.

[garrity]

Let me add: I know this is partially tangential t your question. But I can have this rant in my heart because there isn't enough legal stricture in this matter. There flatly ought to be, even if it only covers the TDAP, MMR, and HEPB vaxes. There is no ethical question about giving children a fighting chance at long-term health, and the legal precedents about child neglect make this a no-brainer.

[purejuice]

i agree, actually. but it is a nexus, as you know, where many (possibly clinical) paranoias conflate. among the black community, for example, the tuskegee fallout is that there is The Plan, one tactic of which is the innoculation or deliberate spread of AIDS to the black community, via infected blankets or something.