The head of Britain’s Islamic Medical Association says that Muslim parents should avoid vaccinating their children. According to Dr. Abdul Katme, the vaccines are “unholy” because they aren’t halal products:
*Katme’s appeal reflects a global movement by some hardline Islamic leaders who are telling followers to refuse vaccines from the West.
In Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Muslims have refused to be immunised against polio after being told that the vaccines contain products that the West has deliberately added to make the recipients infertile.
Katme said he was bringing the message to Britain after analysing the products used for the manufacture of the vaccines. He claimed that Muslims must allow their children to develop their own immune system naturally rather than rely on vaccines.
He argued that leading “Islamically healthy lives” would be enough to ward off illnesses and diseases.*
Terrific.
First, Britain had to deal with the dip in vaccination rates when the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine was falsely linked to autism (by a researcher later found to have accepted over 435,000 pounds from a lawyers’ group hoping to cash in on lawsuits). Now “herd immunity” is likely to be further compromised (and many more children put at risk of disease and potentially serious complications) because vaccines have been declared “un-Islamic” by a psychiatric twit.
I said if you’re going to disregard a medical recommendation, which in this case I don’t advocate, you might as well say it is for religious reasons. It’s still not a smart idea, but it’s better than saying that your kid doesn’t need immunized because no one is getting sick from that in their school, or for the OP’s fake-autism reference.
Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists, just off the top of my head, have religious proscriptions against some (if not all) medical procedures. I don’t agree with it, but it happens on a daily basis.
Oh great. There are enough panic-stricken secular vaccination naysayers out there without religious loo-las amplifying it.
In other UK-based fundamentalist-religious-asshole-threatening-children news, we’ve got a Christian pastor publically accusing children of witchcraft, and praying for them to die.
My uncle didn’t vaccinate any of his kids back in the '50s and '60s because he didn’t trust it for some reason. No religious reason…he just said he wasn’t going to do it. They’re all fine. Do I think it’s stupid? Sure. But he pulled it off.
Damn, I want to reduce population growth, but not at the cost of kids getting Polio.
I am not even comfortable with abortion*, never mind this feeble-minded Dr. Abdul Katme attempt at retroactive abortion.
Kalhoun, there should statistically be plenty of similar examples. The idea of vaccinating children is that it reduces a 2% chance to a .01% chance. That is a huge amount of kids and why should parents gamble on such things. Polio was a rampant and horrible disease. Your uncle took a big risk for his kids and thankfully, none of them paid for it.
Jim
I am pro-choice; I am just not comfortable with the idea. It is not my right or place to prevent others from doing so.
Definetly ignorance. I’ve got nothing about his being a fuckwad, but if people actually take his advice (and I imagine they will) they’ll be hurting their children for naught.
Speaking from a practical viewpoint, though, is it possible to produce versions of these vaccines which are halal (assuming of course that he’s correct to say they aren’t)? It’d be worth the extra effort.
shrugs I’m not a Jew or a Muslim, I couldn’t say. That too would be foolish, IMHO, even more so that refusing a vaccination, but then I do tend to think any kind of religion-based dietary rules are. It just seems to me that convincing people they’re wrong isn’t going to happen anytime soon, so why not try and work round their restrictions if it means a child’s health?
And if religion was used by American parents as a reason not to vaccinate their kids, no doubt it would be looked at far more critically than Muslims in the UK. After all, the US is a nation of Bible-thumping fanatics, while radical Muslims in the UK are sane and rational. :rolleyes:
Speaking of infertility, although this is a rare complication, Mumps **can ** lead to male infertility if men catch it as adults. I don’t quite think the uncle pull it out yet, one will have to wait until the kids die or get crippled for other reasons not covered by the usual vaccines.