Category: Being a patient

Texas has been in the news as the origin of the most recent rubeola measles outbreak, continuing to spread with over 124 cases recorded and one child’s death.  This morning, travelers are informed they were exposed to measles earlier this month at LAX after an international flight brought an infected person to the U.S. Later today, there was a Seattle area case announced.

The potential exponential climb of more rubeola cases is anticipated over the next weeks due to the growing percentage of unvaccinated children due to the “anti-vaccine” movement.

Mr. Kennedy, our new HHS secretary, has a great deal to do with that change in vaccination rates, but I’m not writing about the politics of his views which are popular among a strident minority of citizens.

He does not speak or act in concert with the world’s public health scientists and experts. They have worked tirelessly for decades to develop safe life-saving preventive medical care that has significantly dropped infant and child mortality rates, as well as all-age hospitalizations and deaths from infectious diseases.

It started with the small pox vaccine, routine in the U.S. 175 years ago. It’s now been almost seventy years since effective vaccinations became standard for childhood killers like polio, measles, mumps and whooping cough. People my age and older had no choice but to suffer through childhood infectious diseases, given how quickly they spread through a non-immune community. 

Yes, most of us survived, harboring life-long natural immunity. A significant number did not survive or have suffered life-long complications from the effects of those diseases.

People living in privileged first world countries have forgotten the harsh reality of morbidity and mortality statistics, and too many turn their backs on vaccinations, considering them “too risky” for themselves and their children as these diseases become less common in a mostly vaccinated society. In contrast, millions of people without easy and affordable access to vaccines in third world countries have not forgotten the devastation of these infections. They gladly walk miles to get their children vaccinated to give them a better chance at a long life.

As most measles cases in the U.S. originate from overseas travel, it’s especially critical that Americans be vaccinated when traveling outside the U.S., even to Europe. Those who serve in third world countries and mission fields are particularly vulnerable, and I’ve found it interesting that previously unvaccinated Christians are usually more than willing to accept immunizations when they know the risk of exposure is high where medical care may be minimal.

As a society, we simply don’t think about immunizations in the same way as we did in the 1940s and 50s. When I received my first DPT vaccination at the age of 4 months, my mother wrote in my baby book: “Up most of the night with fever 104.5 degrees,  considered a good ‘take’ for the vaccine.”  She truly was relieved that it had made me so sick, as it meant that I would be safe if exposed to those common killer diseases. Now a febrile reaction like that might be considered grounds for a law suit. Our vaccines have vastly improved with ongoing research to improve their effectiveness and reduce their side effects.

When measles or mumps or pertussis outbreaks reemerge within our borders,  we act surprised when it becomes a major media event — but we shouldn’t be. Diseases that were nearly nonexistent a few years ago are occurring with greater frequency again in modern societies due to misguided and misinformed anti-vaccination campaigns.

As a college health physician, I helped enforce vaccination requirements for a public university. A week didn’t go by without my having a discussion with a prospective student (or more likely the student’s parent) about the necessity for our requirement for proof of mumps, measles, rubella vaccination immunity. 

I am accused of being a pawn (or, absurdly, a financial beneficiary??) of the pharmaceutical industry because I believe in undeniable evidence of the efficacy of modern vaccines to help keep a community free of infectious disease outbreaks that can kill healthy people. 

I helped coordinate a public health response at our university in 1995 when we had a rubeola outbreak of eleven confirmed cases over a three week period, necessitating the mass vaccinations of over 8000 students and staff over three days so our institution could safely remain open.  

Having experienced first hand what the effort and resources it takes to respond to a potentially lethal contagious disease outbreak, I am so discouraged it is now happening again and again, due to a “MAHA – Make America Healthy Again” misinformation campaign swallowed whole without questions by thousands of concerned parents.

These families are banking that everyone else will be vaccinated, which puts their own child at lower risk. The problem is: guess again.  There are too many deciding that they are the ones who can remain vaccine-free.

I don’t think any one of these parents would deny the life-saving miracle of injectable insulin for their child diagnosed with diabetes, nor would they fail to strap their child into a car seat for the rare but real possibility of a life-threatening collision on even the shortest car ride.

Vaccines are miracles and instruments of prevention too, but the rub is that we have to give them to healthy youngsters in order to keep them healthy.

I’m an old enough physician to have seen deaths from these diseases as well as the ravages of post-polio paralysis and post-polio syndrome, the sterility from mumps, and deafness from congenital rubella. My father nearly died from the mumps that I brought home from school when I was eight and he was in his early forties. My sister-in-law almost didn’t pull through when she was an infant and contracted pertussis. I’ve seen healthy people develop encephalitis and pneumonia from chicken pox. 

I’ve seen an otherwise healthy college student die of influenza within a week of getting ill despite everything modern medicine could offer him.

If only there were a shot for irrational fears and conspiratorial distrust.  When I’ve written about my stance on vaccinations over the years, I’m astonished at the vehemence of the angry responses coming from individuals who have no trust whatsoever in the advances of modern medicine to prevent the killers that have devastated mankind for centuries, but will spend resources on unproven prevention strategies.

Sure, I wish vaccines were perfect with no side effects and conferring 100% immunity — but as yet they aren’t.

I wish medications that are developed for treatment of a few of these illnesses were perfect but we can’t depend on a 100% guarantee of cure once sickened.

I wish our immune systems were perfectly able to respond to infectious diseases, but they too fail and people do die.

There will always be a new plague on the horizon – history has demonstrated that over and over with the appearance of COVID, HIV, SARS, Ebola or multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and now new strains of Avian flu are in our farmyards. There will be plenty to keep our immune systems at the ready because we don’t yet or may never have effective vaccines widely available for all diseases.

But there is simply no good reason to invite the old plagues back into our homes, our schools,  our blood streams, and onto our death certificates. They deserve to be merely a chapter in the history books as the killers of yesteryear, now wholly overcome by modern medicine.

It takes a united front against these killers to prevent them from leaping from the pages of history to once again wreak devastation upon us all.