Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy:
There's a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It's a collection of stories about, and photographs of, spectacular accidents involving big guns and ammunition. Gun turrets that have fired on other gun turrets on the same ship. Holes in the coral where ammunition ships were formerly anchored. That sort of thing. It's simultaneously grim and fascinating.
Nowadays there's some kind of movement afoot for claiming that immunization against common childhood diseases is unnecessary. That they cause disease. That they're harmful. It is true that rare adverse reactions to immunizations occur. It is also true that adverse reactions to the diseases themselves are not at all rare if you don't immunize. So let's call this post Immunizations: Their Origin and Necessity.
He follows that with a catalogue of some of the diseases that are prevented by childhood immunizations, a description of the symptoms, and some of the gruesome statistics of these once-common killers. It's a sobering read.
Polio is included in Jim's list, and is my personal touchstone for the origin and necessity of immunizations. A very dear friend of the family, an attorney who worked with my grandmother on Long Island, had a severe case of polio. He caught it in the 50's, very shortly before Salk's vaccine was developed, and it was devastating. Both of his legs were paralyzed, and he had trouble with his lungs as well. He used to have to sleep in a rocking bed, to help his breathing, which made it almost impossible for him to travel.
He didn't let that stop him, though, and used to make regular trips to the Florida Keys with his father, to go fishing. He had a second rocking bed down there, that was stored by the owners of the motel they always stayed at. After his parents died in the early 80's, my father and I made a few trips to the Keys with him, and those are some of my favorite memories. Getting him out on a bonefishing skiff was a major production, but well worth it for the experience.
And even though the effects of polio made it hard for him to raise his voice above what most people would call a whisper, he loved talking about just about anything. He'd talk for hours about law, politics, history, science, food and wine. And even when I was a little kid, he always talked to me seriously, not in that "I'm humoring a little kid" manner that some adults have. I always appreciated that.
I wish Martin had lived long enough to get to meet Kate. He would've really liked her, I'm sure, and she him.
When he was in the hospital in the early '90's (he developed some kind of aneurysm that was what eventually killed him), there was a nearly constant parade of medical students through his room (he got to where he could do most of the medical spiel that accompanied the tour). None of them had ever seen anybody with such a severe case of polio, and they had no reason to expect another opportunity.
And really, I can't think of a better argument for vaccination than that. Polio is an absolutely horrifying disease, and you never want to be anywhere near catching it.
And thanks to Jonas Salk and widespread vaccination, you very likely never will.
Polio outbreaks used to be common-- I've heard my aunts and uncles talk about the polio scares that used to close public swimming pools and the like, and those were regular features of life before Salk. Since the development of a safe and effective vaccine, it's something that not even medical students see first-hand.
That's why, as much as SteelyKid hates getting stuck with needles (and even though I can't bear to watch), she'll always get her shots. I've seen what the alternative looks like, and it'd be worth a thousand needle sticks to avoid that.
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Showing parents the results of their (in)actions would be indelicate. Social engineering separates personal decisions from personal responsiblity. The more heinous the indiscretion the bigger the payoff. That's compassion!
Unmarried, unemployed, student loan-drowning California octo-mommy, facing $100,000+/month costs for her 14 children (two cripples and eight super-preemies) gets a free ride. Who pays for your childcare, sucker?
Any parent who immunizes is a fool. Defective children are tax-free whopping paydays. All ya gotta do is keep 'em alive - and the State has a bottomless wallet for that, too. Every parking space should be a handicapped space. The able can park elsewhere.
The problem most antivaccination people have is they don't determine risk the same way as the rest of us. There is a small risk that the child will get the disease, but if they get the disease, there's a large risk they get some horrible symptoms. Pair that will the certain risk of getting a shot and the tiny risk of side affects associated with the shot, and they choose the small risk the child gets the disease.
Just doesn't make sense to me not to take advantage of modern medicine in this way.
In the end, parents who don't vaccinate their children are simply creating a public health hazard. It's bullshit for civilization to entertain their nonsense.
Some people are like that with any medicine. I read a story a couple of years ago, about a toddler who got a rare side effect of cough medicine: hallucinations. The parents were scared, and the mother said to the newspaper that if she had known that this could happen she would never have given the medicine to the kid. Truth is that if you want to be guarded against all of the rarest side effects you will never be able to get the good effects -- you will almost never take *any* medicine.
The small population staying away from vaccines is just benefiting from the much larger percentage of kids, like steelykid, who get poked with needles. For the most part, this abstaining population is too small to really matter. Thus, no reason to complain about them at this point. And if Western countries had more fecal contamination, more of us would have been naturally immune to polio. But, who wants more fecal contamination anyway?
No, Natalie, there is not a small risk that a child will get the disease. There is a really high risk that the child will get that disease. That is what makes things like polio, smallpox, diptheria, and whooping cough so dangerous. They are infectious diseases.
Smallpox was actually eliminated, but the others are still out there. The only thing that keeps the risk to their child low AT THE PRESENT TIME is that almost all other parents are immunizing their children. If other parents followed the advice of the activists, the risk would not be small for long and we would be back to the era when you needed a large family to be sure some kids survived to adulthood.
Words cannot describe how significant the development of the two polio vaccines were. In addition to remembering vividly the day Kennedy was shot, I also remember vividly waiting in a long line to get the new polio vaccine. It was a public event. And since I also know an adult survivor of polio, I really understand the utter and total fear my parents had of that disease.
I had a patient many years ago who had polio.
She had a tracheostomy and a 24 hour caregiver who used an ambu bag to breathe for her---forever.
CCPhysicist - the low risk I'm talking about is the current risk of getting something like the measles. The thinking goes something like "You never hear about anyone getting the measles, so why should I immunize my child against that disease, when the immunization has the chance of causing problems."
I understand the importance of herd immunity in preventing these diseases, but non-vaxers don't (or are just hoping in their heart of hearts that everyone else vaccinates so their child doesn't need to be).
Measles in the United States is more common than childhood starvation, so it follows that if measles is too rare to worry about there's no point in feeding children.
@Dude #5
NOPE! not even close. In the UK there has been a resurgence of the measles, as many people jumped on board when Andrew Wakefield tried to connect vaccines to autism in 1998 by skewing his data. I believe the vaccination percentage has dropped into the 80's in the UK since (citation needed, but you can find many links to credible sources here on SB, check out Orac over @ respectful insolence) Heard immunity is a very very big deal. Vaccines don't make you 100% immune, and if there is a pool of children that are un-vaccinated, they can pass preventable disease to each other and even to some of the vaccinated. I believe the magic number for a healthy hear immunity is somewhere over 90%.
Re Ãka,
Did the hallucinations even do the kid any harm? Any worse than, say, a nasty nightmare?
My pediatrician wife is always telling me stories of dealing with parents who have gotten on the anti-vaccination wagon (oh, but the parents are experts because they read the internet). These people have no understanding of what the consequences can be or the risk involved. A friend's practice is now dealing with a case in which the parents did not want the vaccine, against the doc's advice - kid dies from one of the diseases, parents sue. At least the docs have all the notes and signatures of the parents rejecting it, but it's the kid that suffered from their stubbornness. I am guessing that this situation is not as rare as one might think.