The United States is awash in vaccine skepticism. It has become a political football and a culture war casualty. Many states have either eliminated the requirement that school children be vaccinated before being allowed in the classroom or have so weakened the requirement that almost any parent can opt out for almost any reason or no reason at all. The result is an increasing number of unvaccinated children attending school which has led to outbreaks of communicable diseases vaccines can prevent.
You don’t have to go very far back in history to see what the world was like before the miracle of vaccines and I do not use the word “miracle” lightly. In my own childhood, children were kept away from community swimming pools in the summer by anxious mothers who were afraid they would contract polio. Many people my age did get polio. Some died. Some spent months in an iron lung because they could not breathe on their own. A friend of mine survived childhood polio only for it to return in his adult years where it caused increasing disability and finally a premature death. This terrible disease was stopped in its tracks by the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in 1955. By 1994, the vaccine was so successful that polio was completely eliminated in North America.
How quickly we forget what those bad old days were like.
Measles epidemics were common in the early European Americas. Death rates were 52 per 1,000 infections with most of the deaths among young people. Other infections involved in epidemics were smallpox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, typhus, cholera and the bubonic plague.
Smallpox killed by the hundreds of thousands in the Americas. It was brought to the continent by the first Europeans and devastated the native Americans, who had no immunity to it. It was a leading cause of blindness with 1/3 of the cases of blindness attributed to smallpox. Adult death rates varied between 20% and 60%. 80% of all children who contracted smallpox died.
A typhus epidemic in Canada in 1847 killed more than 20,000 people, a substantial percentage of the population at the time. Typhus epidemics were common in the Eastern cities of the United States during the Civil War.
The bubonic plague was brought to the Americas by Chinese laborers. It sparked a third wave of the plague. Earlier waves of what was known as the Black Death devastated Asia and Europe.
In 1798 Edward Jenner developed one of the first vaccines. It successfully addressed smallpox and begsan to be widely used. It was not until one hundred years later that germ theory, which postulated diseases were caused by bacteria and viruses, was confirmed and vaccines for many diseases began to be developed.
Many of these diseases are now but quaint memories. They no longer threaten us. No longer must mothers hold their dying babies because we do not understand that germs can spread and sicken our children. Now we can give our children the gift of immunity from so many diseases that regularly killed children only 150 years ago. Do we really want to go back to the days when 20% of children died before their fifth birthday of diseases for which we now have vaccines?
Vaccines have been so successful in ridding us of the scourge of these deadly diseases that we now fear the vaccines more than the illnesses. The parents who lived through these epidemics before the development of vaccines would be astonished that parents today might choose not to vaccinate their children.
Why get a vaccine when the illness for which the vaccine is being offered is so rare or never occurs? It is not that the illness no longer exists or no longer poses a threat. Many well-meaning parents have never seen these diseases simply because we have mostly vaccinated our way out of them. Mostly, but not completely. The United States had been declared free of measles but it remains at large in other parts of the world and comes to us today on transoceanic airplanes and infects those who have not been vaccinated.
Many of the unvaccinated benefit from the herd immunity created by the vaccination of their neighbors. With childhood vaccination rates falling, we are dropping below the minimum vaccination rate necessary for herd immunity. This is a self-inflicted wound. It is particularly unfortunate for those who, for one reason or another, cannot be vaccinated and who must depend on herd immunity.
Eventually, this vaccine skepticism will pass. The question is how many unnecessary deaths and illnesses must we suffer and how much scarce medical resources must we spend on them before people realize the illnesses are far worse than any risk presented by the vaccines that prevent them.
The post Vaccines: Victims Of Their Own Success appeared first on Sandweg & Ager PC.