Please vaccinate

It’s not likely they colluded. Yet on Jan. 31, publisher Gordon Forgey of the Whitman County Gazette and managing editor Devin Rokyta of the Daily News published editorials on the dangers of ignoring vaccinations.

The reason? Washington State’s Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency because of a growing measles outbreak.

In 1736 Ben Franklin lost a four-year-old son to smallpox. Recounting that event, the Washington Post quoted from Franklin’s autobiography: “I long regretted bitterly, and still regret,” Franklin wrote, “that I had not given it to him by inoculation.” Franklin was so affected by his loss that he later co-authored a “how-to guide on smallpox inoculation with a London physician,” the Post reported.

The writer observed that, nearly three centuries later, “our incredible success” with vaccination programs have allowed us the “luxury of indulging in an ill-informed skepticism of them.”

Measles is not smallpox, but it is highly contagious. That contagion can begin four days before a rash appears. Measles carries with it serious medical complications and can result in death. It was “the leading killer of children in the world” before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, the Daily News reported.

If you haven’t vaccinated your child, consider this possibility: your unvaccinated child contracts measles and unknowingly shares it with another. Your child recovers; the other doesn’t.

--Pete Haug, Colfax