Juniper Russo on SBS Radio

Last month, I gave a radio interview for SBS in Sydney, Australia. It was during the onset of the Disneyland measles outbreak and another outbreak in Germany, both which had alarmed so many experts that they made news overseas. Parents and physicians worried that growing anti-vaccine rhetoric in their own communities could encourage widespread outbreaks of measles.

I was very pleased with the work of Lin Taylor, who is a journalist working hard to give accurate and timely information about news happening in Australia and all over the world. In the article and radio interview, she states,

"As a young mother, who fell pregnant at 20, Ms Russo said she was naïve and scared of the challenges ahead.

"I didn't know how to tell good information from bad information. So I got very easily misled by this subculture of natural parenting and I got swept into the fear – which is what led me to make those mistakes.

"I wanted to believe that children are completely safe without vaccines," the 27-year-old mother of two said. "I heard people saying that they were dangerous. It was very easy to mistake that for real science. It was really easy to fall into this trap of mass hysteria."

In February, an unvaccinated 18-month-old boy died from measles in Berlin, Germany. This was the first known fatality among more than 570 recorded measles cases in the German capital since October 2014. The resurgence of the preventable disease in Germany, as well as in parts of the United States, coincides with a movement among some parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.

The so-called anti-vaccination movement in which fears about potential side effects of vaccines, fuelled by now-debunked theories suggesting a link to autism, have led a small minority of parents to refuse to allow their children to be inoculated. "

Read the rest of the story here.

"Circumcision Can Kill You, But Measles is No Big Deal!"

Heard anything like this in your local "natural parenting" groups? It's not usually stated this directly, but let's take a look at the facts. A good many of us crunchy mamas eschew circumcision because there isn't medical evidence of its necessity, and because circumcision can carry some risks. Granted, these risks are low-- but they're there.

Anywhere from one in two hundred to one in five hundred babies will suffer a complication from circumcision. Almost all of these are mild, like bruising, bleeding, or loss of small areas of skin. Very rarely, they can cause serious infections, or-- most horrifically-- the total loss of the penis. And, as many an intactivist has pointed out, there are even a few cases of babies dying from complications of circumcision.

The number of babies who die from circumcision is extremely low. Two studies, one of 500,000 babies in New York City and one of 175,000 babies in U.S. Army hospitals, found zero deaths related to circumcision. That means that out of 675,000 babies, none-- not one-- died from circumcision.

A lot of us don't really care how low these numbers are. Even one death in a million is a risk we'd rather not take unless it's absolutely medically necessary-- right?

That reasoning would be fine enough if moms applied it across the board, but unfortunately, it seems like most of them don't. For example, in my local crunchy group today, moms were working hard at organizing a local measles party, though they were upset by the fact that no one in the area had yet caught measles. When I swung into the thread to point out that measles isn't a mild condition-- that it can be fatal-- my "fearmongering" was immediately dismissed because measles only has a death rate of about one in a thousand.

Hold up-- so are we, or are we not, willing to take precautions to protect our children even when the odds of them dying are low? If we want to protect our sons from the one-in-a-million chance that they could die of a circumcision, why aren't we willing to protect them from the one-in-a-thousand chance of dying from measles? The game of numbers can't matter only when it fits our biases.

Measles can kill. It probably won't kill your kid, but the odds of him dying of measles are much higher than the odds of him dying of many other things that we earth-mamas prefer to avoid-- like circumcision, medically unnecessary medication, cigarette smoke around kids, and a five-mile ride without an appropriate car seat.

Care about your kids enough to protect them from one-in-a-million? Great.

Then care about them enough to protect them from one-in-a-thousand.

VACCINATE FOR MEASLES.