A deadly history

It’s gotten worse for me as I’ve had more children. With our first son, getting the shots wasn’t that bad (for me, Mom). I bore it, he cried for about five seconds, that was it. He never even spiked a fever from them. With our second son, thinking about those needles going into those fat little legs made me recoil, and I just couldn’t watch. By son three, I was sending Mr. DMFP for the well-baby appointments sometimes, just to take a break. There may be some correlation here between leg chubbiness and my visceral response—the legs have only gotten fatter and cuter around here with each offspring.

With all of this Hannah Poling brouhaha, I’ve had the misfortune to read some pretty idiotic stuff about vaccines on different blogs. There is one post in particular that appears to sum up what some of the anti-vaccine movement has to say. It is so riddled with stupidity that it’s not worth repeating here (one assertion is that the live virus in the measles vaccine triggers the immune system to “eat” the myelin sheaths and in the end, the “immune system wins and digests everything.”) My goodness. If this is what these folks think happens with an injection of live virus, I wonder what they think happens when ya really get the measles.

I gritted my teeth and got my children their vaccines, possibly because I’ve read too much history. I’ve read too much about 50% infant and child mortality, about families having 10 children but seeing only one grow to adulthood, about a child’s being perfectly happy and healthy one day and in an iron lung the next, thanks to polio.

It seems to me that people who point fingers at and cry "conspiracy" about one of the most successful, useful, and life-saving health discoveries of modern times have either never read these horrible and all-too-common stories or never lived through the times when your classmates might vanish one by one because of a diphtheria outbreak. Of all the families I’ve ever met in my lifetime, I know of only one child who has had a severe reaction to a vaccination. If I lived in pre-vaccine times, there likely would be hardly any family of my acquaintance who had survived exempt from the loss of a child due to some devastating “childhood” disease.

We have vaccines so that our children will survive childhood, or at least will have a better chance to do so. So that we will not wake every day, especially in the midst of an outbreak, wondering if that will be the day that we watch our child die. Yes, there are risks with vaccines, but these risks—from the larger picture of public health to a close-up of each individual family in the world—are far far less than the risks associated with experiencing even one of the diseases against which we vaccinate.

Yet, the Web is rife with misinformation and emotional appeals grounded in unreality about vaccines. Some information is based on legitimate data, such as links to increasing allergy rates, although there are many other probable contributing factors to that particular phenomenon. When it comes to autism, however, all I can ask, in this, my last vaccine-related post, is that people look to the research literature, not to the Web, in formulating their opinions and conclusions.

Given some of the screaming, crying, rending of clothes, and gnashing of teeth I've seen lately about how "toxic" and "deadly" and "conspiracy-linked" vaccines are, I’m thinking we need some reminders. Here are a few of the greatest hits:

Pertussis: Extremely contagious. About 300,000 people die each year from pertussis, and most deaths are infants. Their lungs essentially explode. The reason there are those bilateral indentions under the ribs of the child on the left is that the child cannot draw breath because the child cannot clear her lungs of air trapped by mucus she cannot cough out. Worldwide, there are between 30 and 50 million cases of pertussis annually. This highly infectious disease could easily spread like wildfire through an unvaccinated population. I know this because that’s what it does in countries that do not have the vaccination. There were fewer than 20 deaths in the United States from pertussis infection in the last year for which data are available, and the vast majority of these were infants who were too young to be vaccinated. In addition to killing babies, it also can cause brain damage and mental retardation.

Measles: There are between 30 and 40 million cases of measles globally, each year, and about one million people die from measles infections. There were only 50 cases of measles in the United States in the last year for which data were available, thanks to vaccination. This is a respiratory virus that can, obviously, have severe consequences, including encephalitis (0.1% of cases) and pneumonia (1 in 15 cases). Up to 20% of people infected with measles are hospitalized. And it kills, by the million.

Rubella: This is the one that can, if passed to a pregnant woman, cause severe birth defects in a developing fetus, especially with exposure in the first trimester but also throughout gestation. Only sometimes does this infection actually cause complications in the infected person, usually as encephalitis.

Diphtheria: Before there was a vaccine, the rate of diphtheria cases in the U.S. was 100-200 per 100,000 people. That’s an infection rate of 0.15%, which is far less than the rate of serious reactions to vaccines. When diphtheria is respiratory, it kills up to 15% of those infected. Among the other complications are heart infection. I personally know people whose siblings died of this disease in the 1930s. Mothers used to have sit up for nights at a time to clear the membrane (see image, right) from their child’s throat to ensure that their child did not suffocate to death in the night. Sometimes, that simply didn’t work. Child alive one day, dead the next. In a city the size of my hometown, that would be about 23 children dead each year from diphtheria alone. In one relatively small city in one state.

Tetanus: Here is what tetanus does to babies (warning: This is quite graphic).

Polio: In 1952, there were 60,000 cases of polio in the United States, and at least 3000 people died. Many many more were disabled for life. Children unable to breathe on their own lived in iron lungs. My own mother is old enough to remember classmates going from healthy, running children one day to being in an iron lung the next. The wild virus is still out there.

Vaccines cause “severe adverse events” in one per thousands to one per millions of doses, depending on the vaccine (e.g., smallpox is related with the one per thousands category; most currently used vaccines, such as MMR, are in the one per millions group). As for deaths, VAERS has a difficult time even identifying any deaths attributable to vaccines. According to those totally unreliable members of that vast industrio-politico-governmento-medico-stupidparento-complex that forces you to vaccinate your children, the risk of deaths from vaccines is “extraordinarily low.”

That incubus from hell, the CDC, has helpfully compiled a nice summary of what happened before and what would happen if we stopped immunizations. You can find it here. For people who care at least to see what the Incubus has to say about it all—and let’s try to remember that these people are not actually baby killers or childhood personality thieves by profession—you can read here on their “Mythbusters” page. It’s pretty easy to find real data and good information without resorting to those Web pages where everyone uses exclamation points as though they were French.

My final point is this: Some of these vaccines have been around for a century or more. Some have been around only about half century. Some have been around only a few decades. The “autism epidemic” (an idea that has been cleanly debunked by actual analysis) allegedly began in the 1970s. Kanner dubbed his study group and Asperger dubbed his before some of these vaccines showed up. Other vaccines were around decades before these clinical descriptions emerged. Even more vaccines showed up after the “epidemic” began. There’s just not a way to make the vaccine-autism link fit, not temporally, not based on any epidemiological or clinical study from any country, not based on mercury there vs mercury gone…none of it fits. Thank God, because I’d rather have my son here, with me, dancing like a chicken and singing “opera” in restaurants than have him be dead from exploded lungs, fried brain, diseased heart, paralyzed respiratory muscles, or slow suffocation from diphtheria.

Hannah Poling is a single data point, and as has already been pointed out, an unusual and possibly unique case. My own plea is that we please stop wasting so much time, money, and energy on this long-since-dead avenue of investigation and turn to more promising possibilities. Autism has a multifactorial etiology probably traceable back down many many paths that lead to a similar suite of behavioral manifestations. Based on that alone, Hannah Poling cannot be its avatar.