I recently received a Facebook message from a former classmate of mine. It was a link to a newspaper article about a man in New Zealand, titled “We were hippies about it.” It tells the story of Ian Williams, who decided not to vaccinate his son, and his son’s subsequent infection with tetanus, which almost killed him.
He walked away from the experience saying: “When it came to my kid’s health, I let the hippie win. I should have let the science win.”
There are, of course, people who are opposed to vaccinations. They believe that vaccinations are either not effective or pose some danger to the child. There are very strong beliefs on both sides. But here are the facts.
Firstly, polio is gone. There was a time when polio ravaged the country. In 1916, when the first big polio epidemic struck the U.S., 6,000 people died and 27,000 were paralyzed. In Canada, there were 1,887 cases of paralysis caused by polio in 1959. By 1978, after 20 years of an intensive immunization campaign, there were 11. Canada was declared polio-free in 1994.
There was a time when, if you cut yourself, you could die. If your wound was infected with Clostridium tetani, that bacterium could start producing a toxin that could spread to the central nervous system. The result would be painful muscle spasms that have been reported to be strong enough to break bones. You would think people would die screaming, but sadly, in fatal cases you lose the ability to breathe and you suffocate to death.
Worldwide there are one million new cases of tetanus every year, and 500,000 people die from it. In Canada, where a vaccine is available, no one has died in the past 15 years.
Some people still prefer to get immunized from chickenpox the “natural” way, by catching the disease when they are children. One of my former professors in medical school used to tell the story of how he got his first child vaccinated against chickenpox, but then decided not to vaccinate his second. His second child developed acute cerebellar ataxia as a complication of the infection. Fortunately, he recovered. My former professor always liked to say that after that episode, he made sure that his third child was vaccinated.
Most people have never heard of pertussis or diphtheria. Smallpox has been wiped from the Earth. And most people don’t know the difference anymore between measles, mumps and rubella — because they’ve never seen a case. There used to be 34,000 cases of mumps diagnosed every year in Canada. In 2003, there were 28 cases.
Once-common diseases are now exceedingly rare, so rare that people forget how dangerous infections can be. Mumps can leave you deaf or sterile. Pertussis, or whooping cough, despite its playful name, was fatal in one child out of a hundred.
Vaccinations have allowed us to beat diseases that used to claim thousands of lives every year.
The benefits are clear.
The risks are overstated, though. First, vaccines rarely cause disease. The oral polio vaccine could cause polio in one out of 2.5 million cases, which was exceedingly rare. But it is no longer in use.
In Canada, the U.S. and Europe, we now use the inactivated polio vaccine. Because the virus used in the vaccine is inactivated, it cannot cause disease.
Some people are concerned about allergic reactions with vaccines. While this is still possible, it was more of an issue with previous generations of vaccines, where egg products and other elements were used. It is less of a concern today.
Finally, vaccines do not cause autism. There is a wealth of evidence to deny any such claim. Much of the attention focused on thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was used in microscopically tiny doses in the Hepatitis B and dPT vaccine. At such small doses, it is inconceivable that it could have had any effect on humans. The point is moot, however. Thimerosal stopped being used in vaccines about 12 years ago. Nevertheless, the myth of vaccines causing autism remains as enduring as the myth of Bigfoot, and is just as fictitious.
These are the facts. Vaccines save lives. The risks are minimal. The consequences of not being vaccinated are dire. Get your kids vaccinated. Don’t be a hippie.
Christopher Labos is a cardiologist practising in Montreal. He was the 2012 winner of the Quebec Cardiology Association’s Young Researcher Award.
