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For most people alive today, polio, smallpox, tetanus, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria and birth defects due to rubella (German measles) are distant rumors. But in the early 1800's half of all children born in the United States died before their fifth birthday. A hundred years ago one child out of every six in our country died before the age of 5. Most of these children died of those same infectious diseases I've listed.
Up until the late 1960's, thousands of American children were stricken with polio every year. Most recovered, but many died, and many were left with lifelong disability. I am old enough to have seen some patients who still depended on an iron lung to stay alive. Technically called a Drinker Respirator, this is a big metal cylinder that encloses all of the body except the head. A bellows at the end moves in and out to create negative and positive pressures that move air in and out of the patient's lungs. All the big polio centers used these for victims whose paralysis had ascended to their respiratory muscles.
The polio virus attacks nerve cells in the spinal cord, cells that are essential for making muscles work. There is no known cure. There was nationwide celebration when the Salk vaccine came out in 1955. The Sabin vaccine followed in 1961. Families lined up to get their children vaccinated. Since the 1960's, at least 30 million children have been saved from paralytic polio worldwide, due to vaccination.
Infectious diseases that killed thousands of children every year can now be prevented by vaccination. The epidemics that swept the nation years ago are now nearly unheard-of.
What are vaccinations? Take tetanus. The tetanus germ is found everywhere, in soil and dust. When the tetanus germ gets into a wound it multiplies and produces tetanus toxin, a poison similar to nerve gas, fatal in minute quantities, that spreads throughout the body and causes every muscle to go into horrible, painful spasm. Death usually occurs after a few days of agony.
Tetanus vaccine is made from tetanus toxin that has been altered so that it is no longer poisonous. But the immune system, which has an amazing capacity to learn, reacts to it as if it were the real thing, and this triggers the very complex process by which it builds defenses against the disease. After that, if it encounters the real toxin it can protect the body against it. In other words, vaccinations teach the body to mobilize its natural defenses against disease.
The rumor that vaccination caused autism was started in 1998 by an English doctor named Wakefield, who claimed that it was caused by the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. Wakefield was later found to have falsified his data and to have had financial conflicts of interest that he failed to disclose. He lost his medical license due to unethical behavior and misconduct. No subsequent research has come close to validating his claims. The cause of autism is still unknown. Unfortunately, none of these facts has prevented his becoming a hero to the anti-vaccine movement.
Do vaccines actually cause side-effects? Any time a treatment is given to millions upon millions of people, a few are bound to have reactions. About one of every 2.4 million people given the Sabin polio vaccine has a significant reaction (no side effects more serious than pain at the injection site have ever been proven to have been caused by the Salk vaccine).
Anyone who is reluctant to get their children vaccinated should read the stories of parents who helplessly watched their children die of whooping cough or suffocate from membranes that grow across the throat in diphtheria. Thanks to Salk and Sabin, we no longer have to fear that a cold may be the first sign that our child may end up in an iron lung, or suffer permanent brain damage due to measles. Women no longer have to worry that a mild rash during pregnancy might be a sign that their child will be born deaf or with heart damage. We are lucky today that we live in a time when so many of the terrible diseases of childhood are distant stories. To see them return due to rumor and unfounded suspicion would be a great tragedy, and it is something we can prevent.
Arno Vosk is a medical doctor living in Williamsport.