It is often said that in Britain we have higher regard for animals that people.

Several of my friends who have gone to live in foreign parts have spent small fortunes transporting their pampered pets to pastures new. When his firm transferred a friend of mine overseas the pooches enjoyed the delights of Club Class while with a spectacular absence of tact the firm made his wife endure economy. Happy she was not!

I care little for cats and dogs. Those who do tell me that when it is necessary to take felines to a cattery or canines to kennels the owner is required to produce certificates to prove that the animal in question has had been vaccinated against various diseases. Seems reasonable.

Strange then, that we allow children who have not been inoculated against childhood diseases to begin school or attend nursery.

To me it would seem entirely reasonable to require any child entering the state education system to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella and the rest.

After all, parents would still have a choice. If they choose to act in such an anti-social and irresponsible matter why should they expect the rest of us to fund their child’s education?

Harsh maybe, but there is a real crisis in public health policy and only something drastic will get it back on track.

Diseases that had been reduced to insignificant levels are now making a comeback in exactly the way reputable scientists said they would. It’s entirely because a minority – about 15% of parents still prevent their children from receiving the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccination to which they are entitled.

Even though Andrew Wakefield’s paper claiming a link between MMR and autism was discredited because of conflict of interest, debunked by every credible study and finally disowned by ten of his 12 co-authors it seems that three parents out of every twenty, “prefer not to take the risk”.

Even if there had been a statistically tiny risk of some complication from a jab, the risks associated with the disease are always much greater. It is worth remembering that in the UK during 1941 measles was responsible for more childhood deaths than the Luftwaffe. 

I would like to think that those who neglect their children in this way are simply ill educated, but I doubt it. Urged on by some elements of the press, most notably the Daily Mail and the Independent, the middle classes led the exodus from rationality.

While it would be amusing to see the editors successfully sued by the parents of any child unfortunate enough to suffer complications in the next measles outbreak it would be an unlikely justice. Even the most malevolent and bigoted newspaper cannot do any damage without at least some of its readers being willing to believe what they read.

But there have been enough historic instances of flight from vaccination followed by epidemic, for those producing newspapers to understand the consequences of their actions. Why are these same editors, now that we know the MMR scare was nonsense, not prepared to apologise for acting irresponsible in 1998?

Then there are the religious extremists who refuse vaccination and are content to justify a death from measles as ‘God’s will’. Presumably that means that the invention of vaccination was not ‘Gods will’? That’s a funny sort of God if you ask me.

What would you call someone who exposes their child to several weeks’ severe discomfort and the risk of complications or even death when they could have easily prevented it? What would you call someone who incited them? Abusers perhaps?

If that offends you – good!

Note: The sub editors managed to mangle the last paragraph of this article in its published version.