One of my favorite friends in Utah was a sweet elder man who lived life
in a wheelchair. He had the biggest, most beautiful smile, with an
enormous heart and a handshake that all by itself conveyed that he
cared! As a 19 year-old man, he loved to run, and had a college
track and field scholarship. He was engaged to be married to his
high-school sweetheart. Then came the morning he woke up unable to move his arms or legs. As he lay there in a hospital bed, unable to
move, he was stunned to discover that his wife-to-be had every intention
of getting married to him--no doubt, no hesitation. They lived the
sort of life that touches thousands.
The year he spent in the hospital in an iron lung was the year that they came out with the polio vaccine. Should all healthy children be vaccinated? Go to Logan, Utah, and stand by Richard's grave, and ask him if vaccines are a good and necessary thing. Post-polio syndrome hit him, in the early 2000's, when Richard was only 65 years old. Once it finished taking away the use of his arms, it moved on to his lungs, and before he lost the ability to breathe, he said good-bye to the love of his life, and to his five children. He passed away too soon for all of us who loved him. If you think any of this story is sentimental or sappy, fuck that. I miss him. He was good to me when I was a young, lonely, low-income single mother, and very few other people in that religious neighborhood treated me like a real neighbor.
I was born with rubella. No one knew what was wrong with me as I fought for my life; then, a week after I was born, my mother broke out with the disease, and at least they figured out what was going on. I was damned lucky that my mother caught it so late in her pregnancy; the consequences of having rubella in the first trimester usually include birth-defects such as blindness and microcephaly (undersize head and brain).
I caught chickenpox at age 14. With an immune system more like an adult's than a child's, I was at high risk of having it go into my mouth, nose, and possibly into my lungs. Once in the lungs, the mortality rate is 70%. Allow me to say; I'd have preferred the vaccine, which at that time did not exist. It didn't go into my mouth, but it hit the insides of my ears and one of them still has a thin, sensitive spot in the cartilage where it was eroded by a pock.
My daughter caught chickenpox, twice! The first time, she was only two months old. Can you imagine the miserable incomprehension of such a tiny infant, still less than nine pounds, unable to control her arms or legs--trying to get away from her own itching, hurting, feverish skin? Today, with a commonplace immunization for chickenpox, she would not have gone through that, thanks to herd-immunity.
She caught it again when she was four years old--her immune system as an infant hadn't been advanced enough to lock in immunity for life. My four year-old handled it pretty well. However, many of the pocks became infected, causing scarring that is still visible today (nothing that impacts how cute she is, thankfully).
Secondary infections like the ones she had to suffer through will become increasingly dangerous as antibiotics become less and less effective--I remember the thick green pus in sores that were half as large as a dime, and if that grosses you out, just think how much more pleasant it would be if she and I had never had to deal with it, either. If she hadn't had the chickenpox as an infant, I might have tried out the brand-new vaccine for chickenpox, that came out only one year earlier.
I have been affected directly by these diseases that can be avoided. My kid is as immunized as she can be--including the HPV vaccine, thank goodness. I will not lose my kid to cervical cancer in her 30's. I am well-immunized against those things that I frankly wouldn't want to have to deal with, even if they don't cause many lasting side-effects. We're damned lucky to have those vaccines available today, at little cost, at any clinic in the city.
If you could talk with any parent of children in the 1940's; yes, getting those diseases was a rite of childhood, generally considered to be no big deal for healthy, well-fed children. But sometimes, children DIED. Sickly children died. Pregnant mothers died, or lost their infants, or gave birth to blind, deaf, mentally impaired children. What of parents in the 1930's? When the Great Depression created an entire generation of malnourished children? Yeah ... those kids DID die at high rates from all of those "childhood diseases." Measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox ... and polio.
Polio is the second greatest dread-disease facing the world today. Not Ebola--that's lethal but it's not nearly as transmissible. Not smallpox--we've actually eradicated that particular bugaboo. Polio--godds forbid that monster should ever escape from the few remote villages where it still remains endemic. Got a problem with Islam? Well, it's one of the things that might help eradicate polio once and for all, the way smallpox has been eradicated. People who hide their children from Doctors Without Borders and WHO volunteers who try to immunize their children are encouraged by local mullahs to abandon their fears and superstition, and get their children immunized.
Measles outbreaks are bad enough--science-forbid we might ever see polio return to the United States! With tuberculosis on the rise again, a horrifying and lethal disease that spreads like wildfire and against which a vaccine may never be developed, why in the HELL can't we get rid of every other type of illness we possibly can???
