Can't beat jabs
Re: "Medical costs in Thailand surge", (Business, Nov 27).
Your article claims that children are "more susceptible to common illnesses as a consequence of reduced exposure to routine viruses during lockdown".
Follow that through to its logical conclusion: children should get sick to build a healthy immune system. This is clearly absurd.
Our immune systems are not muscles that need "training" through exposure to viral pathogens. The best immunity is gained through vaccination.
To say that exposure to viruses is necessary for immunity leads to tragedies like avoidable deaths and long-term illness as parents skip the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination and whooping cough vaccines in favour of "natural immunity" through infection.
Or currently, people drinking raw milk in the US in the misguided belief this will give them immunity to H5N1 bird flu.
Instead of accepting childhood illness as somehow beneficial, simple steps like air purifiers, ventilation and masking when sick, are demonstrated through real world data to help prevent the spread of airborne illnesses like flu, RSV and Covid.
For example, a study in Finnish daycares found that air purifiers cut illness amongst children and staff by 30%.
Your correspondent might do better to investigate the effects of viral infections on our immune systems.
There is ample evidence that Covid infections, however "mild", make us more susceptible to viral, fungal and bacterial infections as our immune systems are left damaged (including in those who didn't receive mRNA vaccines).
