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Comment by geye1234 | Hacker News Reader

We have a baby too young to get MMR, and several older children who are up-to-date.

The older kids hang out with quite a few unvaccinated people. Can the vaccinated children act as asymptomatic carriers, and bring measles home to the baby? A quick search doesn't answer that question.

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If the answer is "yes", would you not let your children play with the other unvaccinated children?

I'm curious about your risk tolerance.

I'm not sure yet. It's too much brain-load to make hypothetical decisions. I'd be more cautious and keep a close eye on outbreak locations I think.

Looks like, at current rates, this will be a better year (fewer outbreaks) than 2019 and 2014. So no need to panic right now.

Probably not much reason to panic anyhow. If you live within 20 minutes of a hospital (probably, in 2024), know what measles looks like, and ensure Vitamin A in your family diet, there's a very low likely-hood that even if your family contracts the disease, your infant's symptoms will be mild. IANAD, so this isn't gospel, but I do think it helps to learn and understand risk before panic. There is plenty that can still hurt or kill us in this world, but in general, our ancestors would love to have the peace of mind we have from our modern health care system.

I say all this having had the lived experience of my infant developing necrotic pneumonia from an otherwise innocuous RSV strain that went through our house and spending two weeks in the NICU wondering if she would survive. Prevention is great, and I would never wish anyone to go through what we went through. But I also refuse to panic or live in fear.

EDIT: I had not heard of immune amnesia before. That sucks. I will exercise more caution around measles.

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