With all the good news coming out of India and the obvious determination to keep the country polio free now it has been achieved, another story rattled about the Australian press over the last few weeks that carries a very different implication. News that increasingly large numbers of parents, seemingly from the more affluent suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were deciding against immunisation of their children in an effort to minimise any potential downside risk of the immunisation process gets my blood boiling. Now not being medically trained I guess I shouldn’t be too definitive here, but as an act of selfish indifference to the position of other children, quite irrespective of the real risk to their own precious babies, this position is hardly defensible on medical, ethical or societal grounds. Whichever way you head here, in the absence of any data to support the argument, choosing against immunisation is an act of selfish indifference to the rest of society.
India it seems is able to take a significantly more enlightened view on the role of individuals within a society!