And while I'm ranting...

In 2005, California had a whooping cough epidemic.  I caught it; despite the romantic image of 'whooping' I developed as a child reading Ballet Shoes, it is really not a good time.  The problem is that the whooping starts up after you're feeling pretty good, so you end up back at work having an uncontrollable, endless and breathless coughing fit in front of twenty-odd frightened children.

Anyway, here we are having another pertussis outbreak.  Lucky California!  No dark sarcasm in the classroom means lots of it elsewhere, you see.  Needless to say, this has become fodder for anti-immigration fear mongering (apparently whooping cough takes on human form and comes to the United States without papers, hellbent on infecting upstanding white nationalists citizens) and bad mother blamers (the New York Times had an article titled something like "Wealthy Stay at Home Mill Valley Mothers Fail to Vaccinate, Thereby Causing Nuclear War").*

DTaP vaccines become less effective over time.  Whooping cough sucks, but not literally seeing as how you will be unable to suck down any air.  Get yours updated today!

*For the record, I find anti-vaccine philosophy the kind of individualist, Ayn Randesque tripe that makes me gag, even when I don't have whooping cough.  I do not, however, think that the ponderings of a few overly-educated, overly-monied mothers makes a trend, and I wonder why it is always the mothers who are to blame for anti-vaccine sentiments.


Also, I personally cannot get a DTaP booster; I have an actual, doctor-verified, terrible horrible no good very bad extreme adverse reaction to tetanus and no pertussis vaccine is made without it.  So while this is a case where I am personally counting on herd immunity, it is also one where I cannot lord it over others while waving my pricked arm self-righteously.