According to media reports, at least two people died in October related to flu-related illness. Tragically, one was a six-year-old girl in Florida who had not received a flu vaccine. A middle-aged woman in Kentucky also died, although at this time it is not known whether she had received a flu vaccine or if she had other underlying health complications. The six-year-old girl, though, was healthy and had no known health complications. While the flu vaccine is not always completely effective, as discussed in my last post, this little girl’s death likely could have been avoided had she received the vaccine.
Ironically, vaccines are a victim of their own success, as least as far as the anti-vaccine rhetoric goes. Our preventative public health programs, including vaccines, have largely eradicated the scourge of mass communicable diseases like polio or mumps, diseases that often had lifelong impacts, assuming they didn’t kill outright. Polio in particular used to the terror of American parents everywhere. Imagine sending your healthy child to bed one night, only for that child to wake up unable to move part of their body next day. Imagine having to watch your child lose mobility and have to rely on crutches or a wheelchair, or having to spend much of their lives in a iron lung because their bodies are too weak to breathe on their own. Imagine a scratch with the power to kill, a simple scratch that allows the deadly tetanus bacteria into your bloodstream.
That’s the world in which vaccines were born—a world in which communicable diseases maimed and killed. It’s a world that Americans have largely forgotten, and it’s a world that could return. It’s still a daily reality for parents living in other parts of the planet.
Americans are not safe while diseases such as polio still stalk the world. As recent outbreaks of mumps have demonstrated, people and goods aren’t the only thing that can travel. One infected person in a crowd could infect hundreds, assuming the disease is communicable enough. That’s something that only herd immunity can combat, and herd immunity is dependent upon a high percentage of the population being vaccinated. While national vaccination rates are still high, a small geographic cluster of people with low vaccination rates could suffer an outbreak, and potentially spread it to other communities as well.
Vaccines are a vital component of public health, and we shun them at our peril.
