There is a new issue coming up for the children that were removed from the polygamy ranch in Texas, and it has the potential to be a rather serious issue.

It seems that there is no documentation readily available that these children have had their normal immunizations.

I know that there is a bunch of controversy over immunizing children because of the potential of mercury in immunizations, but I believe that situation has been taken care of.

Some people may wonder if the children, especially the older children, really need to be immunized and my personal answer is yes. Recently, here in Wisconsin, we had an outbreak of measles, and an adult woman who was diagnosed with Rubella.

The other issue is that foster care regulations require that all children in care have current immunizations, both for their good and for the good of the other children. Imagine an outbreak of measles or chicken pox in a foster home.

Further complicating the fact is that many of these young girls are pregnant or have already had children, but have never been immunized. There were 463 children removed from that ranch. Can you imagine wading through paperwork and trying to figure out how to accomplish this task?

We’re facing a similar situation here, but a much smaller scale. Hannah’s immunizations were not current when she entered our home. In most cases she would not have been allowed to enter school, but the fact that we were working to get the immunizations current made it possible for her to start. Since we didn’t have other children in the house at the time, it wasn’t a huge issue for our family. Sammy was only home about once a month so he was not at great risk, and his immunizations re current.

To add yet another complication to this issue, is the fact that the children were so segregated from the “normal” community, I cannot imagine the stress that these children must feel with being confronted with a doctor’s office, needles for shots and other things that other children are exposed to at a much younger age. What would it be like to have your first immunization at sixteen years old?

I imagine that more issues like this are going to surface as the enormity of this continues to unravel. Will we ever know the full scope of the impact this ranch has had?

Houston Chronicle story

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