Networks through Vaccination

 NY Times Article/Letter

Most people would think, flu season is coming up, time to get a flu vaccination.  It’s natural to want to be protected from the latest or upcoming epidemics, such as the flu or measles.  Unfortunately that is not the case with everyone.  Some adults are not willing to pay for vaccinations for their children such as Lisa Carey, as she stated in her letter, attached in the following New York Times article.  She says that vaccines can only guarantee so much, are not completely effective.  With this is mind, wouldn’t one want to be at least partially protected instead of none at all?  Of course there is more to this case, as the opposition of vaccines and immunizations believe that these supposed solutions are cause of certain neurological disorders such as autism.  There is no proof of this though.

Regardless of adults choosing to allow their children of immunizations and vaccines, they pose a threat to other children in their neighborhoods and communities.  By following their beliefs these adults put other children at risk through the spread of contagious disease, meaning they do not simply consider their children becoming vectors of disease for others.  If one really thinks about it the average human travels to various places per day wheter it be, work, school, mall, park, transit systems, and home.  The life cycle for various diseases can be atleast measured for a minimum of 4 hours outside the host, giving viruses more than enough time to reproduce and find new hosts.

Relating to the subjects of networks, everyone is connected in a large network with people as nodes and their relationship to others as edges.  The disease represents a contagious behavior that is going from node to node depending on a certain probability that is derived from how well one person knows another and various other factors, related to how diseases get transmitted.  Through the decisions of certain adults to not get immunizations for them or their children they increase this probability of the behavior spreading and decrease the social welfare.  Although this is true, the same can be said that it is also possible for the disease to not be spread, that the probability of one’s child not to have the disease without an immunization does exist no matter how low it is.  Unrelated to our article is the type of disease.  In the article attached are diseases that can be cured and rid of but, of course there are diseases that remain with one forever, changing the probability of course, where the difference of  Susceptible-Infectious-Removed and Susceptible-Infections-Susceptible come into play.