As kids return to school after the holidays, New Jersey has become the first state in the country to add flu shots to the list of attendance requirements. Parents in New Jersey had until December 31st to vaccinate their kids. Children who have not received the flu vaccine will not be allowed back into the classroom. Ten years ago, this would not even have been a blip on the national news radar. But the well documented rise in autism, and a perceived link between autism and vaccinations, has made this a very hot topic indeed. Mandatory vaccinations have become a battleground between parents and public health officials. This latest law, for a vaccination against a disease that many people do not feel is life threatening, seems like an insult to the anti-vaccination crowd. (Flu of course can be very lethal, particularly to the young, the elderly, and the immune-compromised.) In 1998, the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet published a paper which claimed a link between vaccinations and autism. The paper was soon discredited, after it was revealed that the paper's author had been funded by British trial lawyers who needed someone to publish evidence about the link, so that they could sue the pharmaceutical companies. The Lancet later retracted the article, but its legacy lives on. Despite the scientific community's repeated findings that there is no link, either causal or statistical, between vaccinations and autism, many parents are - understandably - so terrified of autism that they refuse to take any chances. Although the purported link is between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination and autism, their fear has spread to vaccinations in general. Last weekend I listened to an episode of This American Life which covered a measles epidemic that cropped up in California among unvaccinated children. One unvaccinated child traveled to Switzerland, contracted measles, then returned to California where it passed along the measles to dozens of other unvaccinated children. This is particularly disturbing because measles is very serious, very contagious, and very preventable. To anti-vaccination parents, the risk of measles seems lower than the risk of autism - but that is only because most Americans have been vaccinated against measles. In a world where more parents refuse the MMR vaccine, this balance will tip. The more parents who refuse the MMR vaccine, the higher the risk that their children will actually contract measles. (Or mumps, or rubella, of course.) The flu vaccine is common, cheap, and easily available. It prevents the spread of a disease which causes misery and in some cases even death. Not to mention thousands of work hours lost every year across the country! According to the CDC, every year "5% to 20% of the population gets the flu; more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu complications, and; about 36,000 people die from flu." Last year, 86 children died from the flu. New Jersey has taken a stand against uneducated, irrational fear and contagious disease. Will other states be next?