Blog Week 4 - Vaccination in Vacation Town

Vaccination in Vacation Town

As I mentioned in my last blog my family and I have just come out of a few weeks of concurrent household illness; to be honest the whole island has been sick, even the main pharmacy on the island has a huge chalk board out the front of the shop showing how many flu vaccinations they have left to offer, each day the previous day's number is struck through and the updated count of jabs is written on. As per the last blog: the irony is not missed on me.

The problem with my position paper topic:
I have a folder full of research all backing up having strong vaccination recommendation policies, mandatory vaccination policies and how in the absence of either or both of these things communities and micro-populations such as schools can have outbreaks of communicable diseases. My problem is that I'm yet to find anything credible (be it from an ethical, medical or scientific standpoint) that speaks to the other side of the argument. I worrying now if I have picked the wrong topic to research or maybe my own preconceptions about the topic are somehow clouding my ability to see the issue unbiased and in it's entirety.

Tools I've found useful:
So I downloaded and installed Endnote as discussed in the Referencing section of our lessons and not only did I find it useful for helping create APA reference notes I found it a great way to search for published papers themselves. I found myself searching in Endnote, reading the abstracts to filter wanted and unwanted papers and then searching those through the Discover portal on the Massey site. Annoyingly though, I've found a few papers I'd love to read are still unavailable even through the Massey proxies and would require me to pay for their full texts.

The week ahead:
I'm planning on putting in some serious hours over the next week to play catch up and really find and filter all of the relevant sources for my position paper. Fingers crossed I can find some good material for the other side of the argument or it's going to be a fairly one-sided affair. Fingers also crossed for the island as a whole getting better and everyone here shaking their colds, flus and illnesses away so we can all enjoy each other's health again.

Comments

  1. Zinettie ClarkSeptember 24, 2017 at 4:16 PM

    Hey Evan !
    I'm sorry to hear about your family being sick and it going around Raro, some hard out stuff right there.
    Hope all will get better soon =)
    I'm also funding the same frustrations as you, there is just to much studies on one opinion and not enough on the other.
    All the best with getting better =)

    ReplyDelete

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