For a highly readable and eye-opening article on the anti-vaccination movement, I recommend freelance writer Amy Wallace’s “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All,” published last week in Wired magazine.

The article explains why other people’s decision to opt out of vaccinations for their children puts you and your family at risk — yes, even if your family has been fully vaccinated.

Here’s why you should care: Wallace describes how an Indiana teenager contracted measles in 2005 while visiting Bucharest, Romania, and then quickly spread the illness as soon as she got home — including to 34 of the 500 or so people present at a church gathering she attended the next day. Most of those who caught the illness (32) had not been vaccinated against measles. But two had.

“The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases,” Wallace writes. “Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.”

More and more parents, Wallace writes, are acting out of fear and electing not to have their children vaccinated:

(Minnesota is also one of those “opt-out” states.)

UPDATE: I asked Buddy Ferguson, public information officer for the Minnesota Department of Health, if there has been any noticeable change in the percentage of parents declining vaccination for their school-aged children in recent years. Specific numbers are difficult to come up with, he said, but "over the last several years, [the state has] seen some decline in immunization rates among children in Minnesota schools." The percentage of children not immunized is still under 5 percent, he added.

The persistence of pseudo-science
Wallace does a good job of explaining how “well-intentioned people … motivated by love for their kids” have become vulnerable to the pseudo-science behind the anti-immunization movement:

But rational thinking seems to have escaped many in the anti-vaccination movement.

For example, as Wallace outlines in her article, they vilify and even physically threaten Paul Offit, a Philadelphia pediatrician and advocate for mandatory vaccines, for “being in the pocket” of big Pharma because he receives a royalty from a vaccine he co-invented for rotavirus gastroenteritis, the most common form of severe and often life-threatening diarrhea in children. (Public health experts estimate that 600,000 children, including around 40 in the United States, die from this illness each year.)

Yet those same anti-vaccination crusaders welcome with open arms to their conferences a doctor and supplement salesman who proclaims to parents (without any empirical evidence): “No vaccines + more vitamin D = no autism.”

As Wallace writes, “If only it were that simple.”