And my arm kind of hurts. 
We moved to a place that has a deplorable vaccination rate this summer, my husband has asthma, and he works with an idiot who has four unvaccinated kids (including a newborn), so off we went to the public health nurse and got our adult boosters for whooping cough. Up your herd immunity!
I don’t know if this is mundane or pointless, but I felt like sharing it. 
I’ve had the TDaP or DTaP or TDP whatever it’s called now at least twice, in the last ten years. Probably three times. I think I had one in college, and one when I got a new GP when I got my first job here, and yet another when I let it slip to that GP that my husband and I were ready to procreate.
It’s a pretty easy little jab, I always thought. Not worse than most flu shots. Much better than an MMR booster.
You can officially come visit my house now so there’s that. I’d hand out something special when you get a vax. Little kids can get lolly pops and candy. Adults should get something more appropriate like a tee shirt and maybe someone throwing roses wherever they walk.
Ugh, I hated that damn shot. It left me sore for days.
Wasn’t as painful as the Anthrax vaccine, nor was it as annoying as the Smallpox one.
I’ve had whooping cough. Trust me, you’d rather have the pain from the shot.
Good for you!
My Small Boy had what was almost certainly whooping cough earlier this year (despite being all vaxxed up - you can still hit the jackpot) and it was no fun at all. In a totally separate incident (separate because she got it in England), so did my mum, we think.
There’s more whooping cough round than people realise, because not all doctors actually do the test and report the incident. We just got “here’s some antibiotics, if it’s that, they’ll fix it”, which it did.
I got a booster a couple of weeks ago so I could visit the family that now includes a new baby. It was hard to find any vaccine due to a recent whooping cough epidemic. A couple of facts I discovered while chasing around:
the vaccine is less effective than it used to be as the bacteria has mutated and the new vaccines aren’t as effective anyway
the vaccination doesn’t last very long
you aren’t vaccinated at all until at least two weeks after the shot
and due to the change in the schedule of free shots for kids in NSW Australia lots of 3 year olds are now getting it.
A friend of mine had it. He ended up missing something like an entire quarter or semester of grade school because of it.
We really don’t want to get whooping cough - as I said in my OP, my husband has asthma and whooping cough is likely to be very hard on him, and I don’t want to get it either, even with healthy lungs.
I’m sorry to hear the vaccination is getting less effective - dang. Oh well - boosted is better than not boosted still, I figure.
I got my latest TDaP booster in 2008. Yay, me! I think that means I due again in 2018. Unless, of course, I get some sort of injury that calls for another tetanus booster but I try to avoid those.
You can blame the anti-vax nuts in part for the lack of efficacy. As Seth Mnookin explains, they overreacted to the old whole cell’s tendency to cause a higher rate of side effects and pushed for a new vaccine that is less efficacious.
Dammit - if you gave me a choice of getting a not-so-great vaccine versus the older, better one, I’d take the better one any time. I really hate it when good medicine/science bows to the vocal idiots in the crowd.
I got my TDaP (Tetanus, Diptheria, and Pertussis) in the summer of 2013 because it was one of the required boosters for the respiratory program at school. My doctor recommended getting titers of the rest of my childhood vaccinations and I found out that my measles vaccination was no longer effective so I got that one boostered too. I highly recommend getting titers done on all your vaccinations just to be on the safe side. It’s nice to have the peace of mind from knowing you’re as protected as you can be (especially considering how many nasty things I’ve had coughed in my face in the last year and a half of school).
I almost died from it, thankfully I was young enough that I don’t remember a thing about it. I do remember that doing a whoop wheeze was enough to panic my mom when I was a kid, she was in horror of me ending up almost dying again. As it was, I ended up with lung issues, and colds roll into pneumonia in me with very little encouragement. With mobility issues, I am very careful to do deep breathing exercises a couple times a day to clear my lungs all the way down. On bad body days I get stuck flat in bed which is not good for lungs!
And I am in favor of forcibly vaccinating everybody who is not allergic. Fuck religion, that is a fucking dumb excuse. God/diety of your choice isn’t stepping up and magically healing the sick on demand so take precautions to create herd immunity.
I’m turning this idea over in my mind; I’m for personal liberty, but sometimes societal responsibility trumps personal liberty, and this might be one of those times. On the other hand, if we force vaccinations, what’s the next thing we force on people for their own good?
Funny thing - for decades the Amish were against vaccinations but I’ve heard they’ve recently been convinced using a “social responsibility” argument: it’s not nice to spread diseases to your neighbors.
I, too, am in favor of making vaccinations mandatory unless medically contra-indicated (there are other categories besides allergies that shouldn’t be vaccinated, either due to possible complications or because it would be ineffective). The only vaccination I don’t get is the flu shot - because I’m allergic to that. I get as many of the rest as I can. I’d rather have a sore arm or feel vaguely bleh for a few days than actually get sick.
How about letting such things get debated on their own merits as they arise? Not everything has to be the tip of a slippery slope.
The things I learn here.
I never knew before reading this thread that whooping cough was something adults got - I thought it was a kid thing. In my defense I don’t have kids so really haven’t given it much thought. IIRC, any news stories I read about it tend to focus on kids and outbreaks at schools. Michigan has a dismally low childhood vaccination rate and it’s been in the news a lot recently. Apparently Michigan makes it very easy for parents to opt-out of all vaccinations for their children for whatever reason they feel like.
I am absolutely not anti-vaccinations but like Cat Whisperer, I’m a little squishy on whether they should be federal or state-mandated for everybody, excluding medical waivers. (I understand this is not the popular view here!) I’m more inclined to agree that children should be vaccinated for everything that may put them and the community at risk. Adults, not so much.
The problem is that unvaccinated adults also put the community at risk.
In the old days, the childhood vaccinations used to last a lifetime because occasional contact with kids who got the diseases acted as boosters to those shots. We’ve since learned that when we really get herd immunity going then the vaccines wear off in about 10 years… leaving the adults vulnerable to what used to be childhood illnesses. Some of these are actually more hazardous to adults than children. Polio, for instance, is more hazardous the later in life you contract it. So is chicken pox. Shingles started becoming more common because people who had had chicken pox weren’t get their “contact boosters”, the natural immunity falls, and the virus comes back as shingles. So now people get shingles vaccines.
Whooping cough outbreaks occur in adults as well as children, and adults with whooping cough are just as contagious as the kids. One big problem: adults are less likely to stay at home when they have it. Adults are also currently the leading cause of such infections in infants in the US, and infants are the group most likely to die from whooping cough. Another problem with whooping cough in adults is that adults almost never “whoop”, which makes diagnosis more likely to be missed.
Not quite. It depends on the vaccine. Three doses of the modern measles vaccine, for example, will give life long immunity to over 99% of all who get them. You don’t ever have to get another MMR unless titers show it may be advisable. The same is true for the polio vaccine. The really troublesome vaccine right now is the pertussis as it is probably simply isn’t effective enough. But many other vaccines are just as effective as they ever were.
The real issue is mostly lack of access to vaccines in much of the developing world. For example, over 700,000 people die each year from hep b, a virus that is largely preventable by a vaccine. That vaccine is about 95% effective and will confer lifelong immunity for those lucky enough to have access to it.