A renewed controversy about whether to immunize children from specific diseases has prompted a number of commentaries, including one titled: "Why, in 2015, are we debating about vaccination?"
The question reminded me that some years ago, I watched the 1936 movie, "The Story of Louis Pasteur," about the chemist who in the 1800s was considered a quack by the medical community for postulating certain microbes were the cause, not the result, of disease.
Some potentially dangerous diseases - including measles, mumps and rubella - largely had been eradicated in the United States as a result of widespread immunizations.
An outbreak of measles, which started in California, now has spread throughout more than half of the 50 states.
The episode has revived the question: Are immunizations a parental decision or a public health issue? Opinions abound, including those of presidential candidates.
What we do know is, despite major advances in science, some people cling to suspicions that modern medicine is, at best, inexact and, at worse, potentially harmful.
The inability to cure certain diseases, among them the common cold, and new studies that refute previous conclusions perpetuate those suspicions.
Libertarians assert parents are legally responsible for their children and parents, not government, should make decisions. Exceptions obviously exist for criminal cases involving child abuse and neglect.
Public health advocates, on the other hand, argue that because a contagious disease cannot be contained, the issue transcends from private to public, from individual to universal. Exceptions to immunization are permitted, in government and school policies, for health or religious reasons.
We believe the public health advocates have the better argument.
In the aforementioned column, author Rekha Basu of the Des Moines Register wrote: "If it were left to parents exclusively whether or not to vaccinate their children before sending them to school, there would be risks not just to their child but to the whole school. That's why vaccinating kids is an important public health measure."
In a column for Bloomberg News, Justin Fox acknowledges the element of risk. He wrote: "The medical consensus is always shifting; risk can't be completely eliminated. It's just that, when you weigh the real and hypothetical risks of the MMR vaccine against the known risks posed by actual measles- ear infections, pneumonia, convulsions, brain inflammation, brain damage, death - they don't amount to much."
And University of Georgia history professor Stephen Mihm, in a column for Bloomberg View, wrote: "Now, the anti-vaccination movement is back ... If history is any guide, it won't last. There is nothing like the return of an ancient killer to focus attention on the real costs and benefits of vaccination. We should be thankful, perhaps, that we are only facing whooping cough and measles. Smallpox would have been far worse."
Disregarding vaccines is positively medieval. The development of immunizations against potentially dangerous diseases is a gift of progress. By any yardstick - medical, historical, societal - vaccinations make sense for individual children and the public.