Last month, a baby in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania died of pertussis (whooping cough).
I suppose death from pertussis (or any other vaccine-preventable illness) is preferable to the speculated possibility of life with autism for vaccine nay-sayers.
Thank goodness I’m not a pediatrician because I don’t think I would last long trying to convince parents that it is in their child’s best interest to get vaccinated. Herd immunity is only going to take us so far.
Not that this baby would have gotten the pertussis vaccine. The first of the DTaP vaccination (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) is given at 2 months of age. Sadly this baby did not live that long. I have heard vaccine nay-sayers say that they don’t want to subject their precious babies to rounds of painful injections just to protect the elderly in society. Yes, some vaccines are given to babies and children but benefit the elderly more. But it works both ways. Older children and adults are also sometimes vaccinated to protect the babies among us. And this is one of those cases.
Pertussis is making a comeback.
Pertussis is highly contagious. According to the CDC, in 2007, there were more than 10,000 cases of pertussis in the United States. It starts out with symptoms similar to a cold, but after a week or two, severe coughing begins. However, the infection is most contagious before the coughing starts. In adults and older children illness can be mild leading the infected to think nothing of their symptoms. But in the very young, pertussis is much worse leading to pneumonia, convulsions, encephalopathy, and death.
The best form of prevention is vaccination. But the protection we get from our childhood DtaP vaccination weakens over time requiring teenagers and adults to get booster shots (Tdap). This is where public health is failing because a lot of us don’t get these booster shots. When was the last time you went for a tetanus booster? Hint, the recommended interval is every 10 years. That would have been a good time to have received the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) vaccination instead of the Td (tetanus, diphtheria) so that you don’t get pertussis, brush it off as a cold, and expose it to a helpless baby who does not yet have any defenses.
Which is why today, I feel like we have won a little victory. The Lancet today retracted the 1998 paper that linked the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) to autism. Yay! Not only has the study been discredited, but the lead author has been found to have acted unethically in conducting the research.
I know that the Jenny McCarthys of this world aren’t going to care. They are probably going to think that this is a big pharma conspiracy designed to continue to have a market for these “dangerous vaccines” and to malign an “honest doctor”.
But they are just flogging a dead horse so to speak. Since the initial 1998 Lancet paper, close to two dozen other studies have been done by different researchers in different settings in different countries who have found no association whatsoever between the MMR vaccine and autism.
But alas, the seed of doubt and fear has been planted already and we will continue to see children, babies especially, dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.
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