Hepatitis B vaccine

Its murky status under state law shouldn't obscure the value of being vaccinated.

Because of a strange convolution in state law, schools face the puzzling mandate of requiring that teenagers in two grades - freshmen and seniors in high school - be vaccinated against hepatitis B, but the schools can't do anything to compel students to be vaccinated.

We'll grant that this is a peculiar and temporary quirk in the law, as The News-Sentinel's Jennifer Boen explained in a story last week.

But the real question that occurs to us is why any parent needs to be coerced or compelled to have a child vaccinated in the first place.

Hepatitis B has the potential to be a truly terrible disease in some people. About 350 million people around the world have been infected by it, and, in most of them, they have a relatively short-lived illness from which they recover without remaining contagious.

But a few among them - estimates range from 1 to 5 percent - succumb to a chronic form of the infection. This leaves them quite vulnerable to liver damage, particularly cirrhosis and cancer. And they remain infectious for years.

Perhaps some parents are spooked by the cost of hepatitis B vaccine - roughly $50 a dose in doctors' offices. They shouldn't be, at least not when it comes to their children. Any child in Allen County, regardless of family income, is eligible for hepatitis B vaccine free through the Super Shot program.

Or perhaps parents discount the need for hepatitis B vaccine because they think of the illness as a venereal disease transmitted frequently among gay men. They shouldn't be so cavalier about their children not being at risk.

Sex isn't the only way to contract hepatitis B. Like HIV and other blood-borne viruses, hepatitis B can be transmitted through sharing needles. The virus can be transmitted through contact with scratches or open sores. It can be transmitted through food contaminated by even invisibly minute quantities of some bodily fluids.

And perhaps parents shouldn't assume that each child will have only one monogamous sexual relationship with an equally monogamous partner and will never share needles, ever. The vaccine offers easy, safe protection against a potentially fatal disease.

But then there's that bad reputation that vaccines in general suffer from, particularly among the fringes of the political right and left. Vaccines cause horrific side effects, these panicking devotees of urban legends claim. The short answer is that they don't often, and hepatitis B vaccine appears to be even more free of risk than many other vaccines.

The Immunization Action Council reports that more than 1 billion doses of hepatitis B vaccine have been administered around the world. The only adverse effects they attribute to the vaccine are like the minor discomforts anyone could expect after a vaccination, such as swelling and soreness for a short time around the injection site.