The Scourge

In 1900, one-third of deaths in the US were children between ages one and five. Pneumonia and influenza, tuberculosis, and enteritis, an inflammation of the intestines, were responsible for most of those deaths. Over the course of the twentieth century, improvements in sanitation, living standards, and medicine reduced the number of childhood deaths from 30% to 1.4%.

But while diseases such as polio have been eradicated in the United States, measles has reared its ugly head in recent years and have almost reached epidemic stage.

Diseases don't generally die out by themselves. Vaccines are the reason most adults born since 1960 have not suffered through the measles. John Enders and his colleagues developed the first measles vaccine in 1963, and within a few short years, the number of cases had dropped dramatically. By 2015, the disease was almost unknown in the US.

The recent push of the anti-vaxxer camp has allowed a resurgence of measles to attack young children. Although most children recover from the disease, after suffering for two weeks with fever, itchy rash, and dry cough, one fifth of children with measles contract pneumonia and one or two in a thousand die from complications.

Most people don't realize, though, that someone who develops measles as a child can develop serious complications later in life. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE - a progressive, debilitating and deadly brain disorder) can causes mood changes, gradual onset of mental deterioration, and muscle spasms. It's a rare complication, but it can be deadly. Even if your unvaccinated child survives the measles, he or she can come down with serious illness later.

Knowing that measles is uncomfortable, possibly deadly, and can cause complications later in life, why would parents choose to not vaccinate their children? Only risk of a serious complication from the vaccine would induce responsible, loving parents to choose that course.

It's true that the MMR vaccine can cause encephalitis, vasculitis, leukocytosis, and several other complications. If you do an Internet search, you'll find a comprehensive list on reputable web sites. But what they don't say is that drug companies must, by law, list any complication that is observed in 1% of vaccinated patients. One percent is one in one hundred children. According to the National Vaccine Information Center, "As of March 31, 2018, there have been more than 89,355 reports of measles vaccine reactions, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following measles vaccinations made to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)." Millions of children are vaccinated each year; only 90,000 have a reaction.

The risk of vaccination is not insignificant. It's up to each family to decide what's best for their family. But the fact is that measles is on the rise in the US. A recent Popular Science article investigates. It states, "The measles virus infects nearly everyone it comes in contact with, so our main protection from it comes from herd immunity—you need upwards of 95 percent of a population to be vaccinated against it to avoid harboring pockets of the virus."

Of course, some children can't be vaccinated due to compromised immune systems, so their best protection is the rest of us being vaccinated.

According to the CDC, "The chances of your child getting a case of measles or chickenpox or whooping cough might be quite low today. But vaccinations are not just for protecting ourselves, and are not just for today. They also protect the people around us (some of whom may be unable to get certain vaccines, or might have failed to respond to a vaccine, or might be susceptible for other reasons). And they also protect our children’s children and their children by keeping diseases that we have almost defeated from making a comeback. What would happen if we stopped vaccinations? We could soon find ourselves battling epidemics of diseases we thought we had conquered decades ago." This very thing happened in Japan in the late 1970s. Measles isn't eradicated yet; we must be vigilant.