said" No to Vax!" but now we are leaveing the country!

[shantivibes]

hey mamas,

i am so worried ...we are on our way to india the first of the year and we have both desided not to vax,but now i am worrying that we might need some due to the places we will be liveing. if we were to stay in the states i would never do it..and i still might not but i am confused! i haveread everything there is to read and feel so strong about our desision so far,but what if our dd gets sick in india with the diseases we dont even worry about here in america? like polio? the ones that wont kill you i am not even worried about but what about the ones that could? what i would really like to know is to you mama's who have not vaxed ,if you were leaveing the country for a year to asia would you have done anything differently? and any mamas that do travel,what do you do?thanks for reading...

[kavamamakava]

Well, we lived in India for 2 years when I was a kid. My mother was still breastfeeding my younger sister. We did get a few vaxes before we left, but I think they were required to get a visa. Nothing is required these days though. I know quite a few people who bring their babies and toddlers there who don't vax. I also know some non-Indians who are born there and never get vaxed. The only disease that people get vaccinated for that I've heard of anyone getting while in India is measles. That was my niece last October. She was 14 at the time.
During the two years that my mom and my brother and 2 sisters lived there, the only "diseases" any of us got were boils and diarrhea. We lived in remote villages and in the foothills of the Himalayas. My mother even had a serious accident and was taken to the hospital in New Delhi while we stayed at a Sikh ashram in Hrishikesh and the worst thing we got was lice. They almost sent us to Mother Theresa's since it took my auntie so long to come for us.
But anyway, I'm jealous!

[spicyamma]

Hi, don't know if this will help but if you are nursing, the breastmilk will protect your little one. We went when dd was 18months and she wasn't vax against Hep and Malaria etc although we had done some vax before we left. If you are going for a year, make sure you can get bottled water or some good filtered water. Most diseases are caused by raw food and bad water.
If you want any other tips, let me know
Melanie

[Tracy]

there were 700 cases of polio worldwide in 2003. you might want to check where in Africa and where in India those cases were...just as part of your research.

http://www.who.int/features/2004/polio/en/#