San Diego County is teeming with Typhoid Marys. Little ones. There are thousands of them.

Typhoid Mary, you may remember, was a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. In 1907, public health officials in New York identified her as such, and ordered her to stop working as a cook. She refused, denying that she was a carrier of anything. She was arrested and quarantined for three years; after promising not to work as a cook – she had infected a number of people, some of whom died – she was released. She found her way back to her old profession, however, and infected a bunch more people before the authorities nabbed her again and put her away for life.

Immunization. Now.

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We’re experiencing much the same phenomenon right here, right now, in San Diego County. This time it’s whooping cough and measles, and the Marys are school kids. And the active, if well-meaning villains, are their parents.

The Watchdog Institute reported in The San Diego Union-Tribune that, “waivers signed by parents who choose to exempt their children from immunizations for kindergarten have nearly quadrupled since 1990. … San Diego County’s exemption rate is 2.64 percent, compared to 2.03 percent statewide.”

Parents are refusing to have their children inoculated because they believe – have been led to believe – that the dangers associated with immunization are greater that the dangers associated with the diseases themselves.

So they opt out. And in doing so they put their kids, and, more to the point, whole lot of other kids at greater risk.

It all springs from misunderstanding of science, ignorance of simple statistics and willful abnegation of social responsibility.

First, there are no reputable studies that show immunization to be a greater threat than the diseases they’re designed to combat. If there were, doctors, researchers, and public health officials wouldn’t recommend them. Sorry, but they just wouldn’t; that’s not what they do. Scare-mongers can bloviate to their clueless, misguided minds’ content about pharmaceutical company conspiracies, rich medicos on the make, whatever, but no one is trying to kill our kids for a buck.

Second, although there certainly is risk involved in any immunization, that risk is minuscule – much, much lower than the risk of contracting the disease. However, adverse reactions, though extremely rare, do occur – and get a lot of attention. Meantime the disease, knocked back to near non-existence by the immunization program, seems distant, almost quaint. Why, some parents ask, should we expose our child to risk (immunization) when the threat (disease) has gone away?

Well, the threat hasn’t gone away; it’s still out there, waiting for an opportunity. And these parents are supplying one: fresh, warm, running-and-somersaulting-around Petri dishes in which the nasties can incubate. And, since immunization isn’t a 100 percent guarantee, some inoculated kids will then contract it.

Most galling, though, is that non-inoculating parents and their kids are public-health moochers, getting a free ride on the antibodies of others. Because when most kids get vaccinations – and accept the infinitesimal but very real risk of complications – the unvaccinated kids get to live in a mostly vaccinated environment, greatly reducing their chance of coming down with, say, whooping cough or measles. Everybody else antes up; they collect part of the payoff.

Thanks a lot. Thanks for pitching in.