Sukie wrote of this ongoing dialouge : >Beware generalizing where you should not, though. From some of the >earlier statements given it was obvious that the foundation of immunity >has been badly needed. O.K. Let's get specific. When my mother was a little girl, (early fifties) she spent a summer in Greenwich, Conn, in terror. She was not allowed to go out and play. She was not allowed playdates with her friends. Her grandmother, who she lived with, did allow her to her to *call* some of her friends on the phone and speak to them, which made her feel very grown up. Sometimes, her friends would come to the windows of their houses with their phones, and wave while my Mom went to her window with her phone, and waved to them. She told me that at times she got so incredibly bored being housebound, that she lost all sense of fear, but there was always some grown up around to make sure that she didn't leave the house. Good thing, too. Polio was in the neighbourhood, and it caught her classmate Evan. After some pretty seriopus hospital time and re-hab, Evan was able to go back to school, with metal leg braces and crutches. He had a really lurching walk. He learned to get around by pretty much putting his weight on his crutches and throwing the weight of his dead legs forward, balancing on the sturdiness of the braces, then doing it all over again. It's fifty years later, and Evan still has metal leg braces and crutches. He clanks. He lurches. He jerks. Sometimes he falls, and has to be rescued. There is nothing that fancy modern medical science can do for him. He's just *amn lucky that the virus didn't attack the muscles that he used to breathe, and he'll tell you so. The Salk polio vaccination came out, and basically EVERY kid in that neighbourhood, in that town, in that state, in this country lined up for it. And if they were old enough to understand, they were greatful. Their parents sure were. I've had Evan as a houseguest. In the morning, he straps and buckles on maybe fifty pounds of metal. And as I sit here typing I'm thinking that maybe that pile of metal is the foundation of immunity. Do I know that every year a small handfull of children are made ill by the polio vaccine? Yup. Would I get the vaccine for my children? Yup. Is Evan's daughter immunized? What do you think? Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML issue 4644]