Back in the good old days, like 10 years ago, kids who were too young to have received all their shots were still pretty darn safe because of that whole herd immunity thing. Nowadays, thanks to the tireless efforts of charlatans and morons, there are a whole lot more gnarly pathogens floating around, waiting to kill or cripple people. So, what do parents of infants do in a considerably more dangerous environment? Keep them indoors until they get all their shots? Put them in a plastic bubble? Cross your fingers?
Don’t breastfed infants get some immunity from their mothers? Puppies do, I think.
Breastfeeding, ++ handwashing, no passing the baby around, don’t allow people to touch the baby’s hands or face.
That makes sense. I take it there’s not much danger from the kid just breathing in public?
I think breathing is far less dangerous than touching surfaces an infected person has touched. Those baby pumpkin seats that snap into car docks and shopping carts are really useful. Means your baby doesn’t have to touch a shopping cart until they’ve got some shots on board. Plus strangers almost see it as a “no touchy” barricade. Strangers didn’t start messing with my daughter until I stopped using it.
That immunity is not as good as the vaccine kind unfortunately. It also wears off after about six months. You just do the best you can. I keep my baby away from one of the idiot neighbors who sends me Jenny McCarthy links.
And crowds.
If you know your friends vaccine beliefs, passing the baby around a little is going to be fairly low risk. While vaccines are not 100%, they are pretty good and the chances of any of your vaccinated friends bringing measles in are pretty small.
But I would’t take a five month old infant to Disneyworld. Or the mall. Wait until their peditrician says “yeah, they should be covered.”
The real one to worry about is whopping couch - there was a case of that in our kids school this year. And because that’s spread through cough, a crowd is as good as touching something.
Whopping couch.
Whopping couch.
Oh, you mean whooping cough. 
Yeah, that’s a bad one. My teenaged niece got that several years ago, despite having been immunized. She is one of the few for whom immunization is ineffective, and they suspect she got it because of an outbreak that occurred due to the breakdown of herd immunity, caused in turn by anti-vaxers who refused to vaccinate their own kids. :mad:
Agreed. IIRC, taking young babies around everywhere as soon as possible is a relatively recent thing. I’m in my late 20s and my mom didn’t take us around a lot of places as babies or small children partly because of the increased chance of catching something from all the folks one encounters in public. Avoid taking your baby to crowded places until the pediatrician tells you that baby is immunized enough to handle it.
I don’t care how healthy it is for the puppy, women should not be breast feeding dogs.
Moved from MPSIMS to IMHO, home of threads about medical advice and anecdotes.
Slight hijack, but I don’t get why anyone would mess wtih a stranger’s infant at all. I mean, I don’t have kids (thank Cthulhu), and I make a point of giving infants a wide berth in public. I mean, what if I sneeze on it? Or trip and squish it? Or drop something it could choke on? Best not chance it.
That’s how I see it, anyway. Are there sane adults who think differently?
That is a bad typo, but it isn’t as bad as the cough..
There are hordes of them. My daughter is just old enough to sit up in the shopping cart now–11 months is a super cute age by the way–and apparently it’s open season on the cute baby. Every single time I take her out in public at least two strangers come up to her, wave, say hello, pinch her toes, and stare at her while waiting for a reaction. Often she starts to scream and I think it serves them right.
Ah, I remember when the couch was used for whoopee-ing …
The vaccine is never perfect; it reduces the risk substantially but does not eliminate it. If a non-vaxxer with disease exposes 500 people, 490 of who are vaccinated, then of the 10 who were not immunized a majority may get the disease, and of the 490 who were vaccinate only a small minority may get the disease, and yet in absolute numbers more with disease will be those who had been vaccinated.
Making up numbers, say only 5% of those exposed who were vaccinated catch the disease, and 80% of those who not do. Then there will be about 25 cases of disease in vaccinated individuals and 8 in unvaccinated; about 75% of cases occurring in those who were vaccinated.
Public service announcement: adults please make sure you have had your pertussis booster within the last 10 years (TDaP), especially if you have any contact with kids, your own, grandkids, etc. Adults may not get very sick with whooping cough, but they can pass it on to not yet fully protected little ones (thinking in particular those under 6 months) who are much more likely to get more seriously ill.
People are kinda ridiculous. I have had to tell people I don’t know not to touch my daughter as they were reaching out to grab her hands. I had one stranger offer to hold my baby while I went through the turnstile at the subway and then hand her to me on the other side. As well intentioned as I assume he probably was there is no way in hell I was going to hand my baby to a stranger, let alone hand her over and then put a metal barrier between us. Visions of kidnappings danced in my head for days after that.
I have to take my baby in public occasionally and I live in NYC which means crowds are just a part of life. We try to travel at times when there are fewer numbers of people which means we schedule doctors appointments and things to avoid rush hour traffic and we don’t go out very much on weekends. We also have her vaccinations done the day she is eligible. For the 2 month vaccines the doctor said they need to be given between 2 and 3 months so we had them done when she was 2 months and 1 day old. We also have one of these things which is designed to protect the baby from rain, wind and snow but is also very good at protecting the baby from sneezy, sniffly strangers and weirdos who think it is okay to touch your baby even though they don’t know you.
I love this whole post! What if you trip and squish it?!?! BWAHAHAHHA - hilarious. 
Anyway, I specifically keep Junior away from children that I know aren’t vaccinated, and when he was an infant I tried to keep him out of very crowded places.
Really, I think that’s the best you can do. I believe that I have a permanent bitch-face on, so I didn’t have to deal with random people coming up and mauling him. Now that he’s walking he does tend to interact with people a lot more (he’s kind of outgoing - he’ll wave at people and say Hi) although it tends to be seniors that come to say hello and I feel like most of them are probably immunized out the wazoo - I think that people who grew up with friends and siblings dying of these various things tend to be less stupid about it.
Well, I get being careful, but they’re not made of glass, you know…
I love to look at babies, smile at them and tell their parents how adorable they are in the grocery store. It’s a small beam of sunshine in an otherwise dreary chore.
There is a big difference, IMO, between waving at a baby that smiles at you and telling their parents they are cute, and going up and touching the baby. Don’t touch the baby! Waving is OK.
Sattua can tell me if she feels differently, but in my mind those two aren’t remotely comparable.