Writing article - is this accurate?

[dharmama]

I'm writing an essay on my personal process of deciding what route to take regarding vaccines for my local parenting paper and I'm unsure of this part...

I wrote...

“What if our child is the one in 1,000 who has a severe (read: fatal) reaction?” or on the flip side, “What if our child contracts a serious (read: fatal) disease and we could have prevented it with a vaccine?”

In other words, “What if we set out to do what we believe is best, and we are wrong?”

I'm using the "one in 1,000" statistic not literally but just because it was the number that my husband and I used to throw around when we were talking about this issue.

Do you think this is ok to use? Or should I find out a more accurate/exact number? And what would I base it on....one particular vaccine or is there a general number out there of how many severe reactions take place per 1,000 shots??

[mamakay]

I think that 1,000 number is fair, because the thing about a lot of vaccines is, it's a definite exposure, when the chances that your child will contract the disease at a vunerable age is a small chance. Pertussis is a good example. It's a virtual certainty that your kid will catch it at some point, but hopefully it won't be until after age three. But the vax starts at 2 months, and it's a repeated exposure again and again and again in infancy.
So the odds are different, and not totally straightforward to try to estimate.
You also have to factor in the under-reporting that we know is there with vaccine reactions. But how to roughly estimate the true incidence is almost impossible.
And then there's the problem with doctors not tending to accurately diagnose a lot of VPD's, and people treating them at home, so that the complication-to-case ratio for VPDs is inflated, too. So that ends up making the diseases look a bit more dangerous than they are a lot of times, since the "sicker" a kid is, the more likely they are to end up at the hospital and be counted as a case.
What a headache to try to figure out, huh?

[Deborah]

Yes, and the reaction rates for each vaccine are different and the types of reactions are different. The complications for each disease are different and some complications are more common and others much more rare.

So it would be damned hard to come up with any sort of statistic that would make any sense across such a varied landscape.

I think I would say something about the odds being very hard to calculate and explaining some of the reasons why.

[dharmama]

Thanks. I submitted my article yesterday. Now let's hope my editor chooses to run it. :