We all remember the Ice Bucket Challenge from last year, where people dumped buckets of ice over their heads and dared their friends to do the same and post it. Even celebrities participated in it and posted the videos. Although, we also remember why it started to begin with (well I hope you do). The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was started to raise money and awareness about Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, “a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord,” (About ALS, 2015) and eventually leads to paralysis and death.
In his post “The Dangers of Vaccine Denial,” Nicholas Kristof discusses how paranoid parents don’t vaccinate their children from harmful, yet preventable, diseases. Doing so not only endangers the children, but also poses a threat to those who cannot be vaccinated. The reasoning behind the parents refusing vaccinations for their children is the suspicion that vaccines cause autism. In my opinion, Kristof is correct when he calls this reasoning “nonsense,” (Kristof, 2015). First of all, this notion that vaccines cause autism has never been proven. I personally don’t have a lot of experience with autism and therefore do not know the definite causes for it, but I am aware that vaccines and autism have never been scientifically linked. I do know that autism is not such a horrible and unmanageable thing that parents should be so afraid of their children having autism. The stigma that having autism is worse than dying of a disease that could be easily prevented is proof that more people need to be better educated about both autism and vaccines in general.
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