This story was published in the February 2017 issue of Parents Magazine. See the full story here: https://www.parents.com/baby/health/vaccinations/the-horrifying-consequences-of-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
Veronica McNally was enjoying a walk with her kids in May 2012 when 2-month-old Francesca coughed. If Veronica hadn’t been fighting off a cough herself, she might not even have noticed it. But she was worried her daughter had caught whatever she had, so she called the pediatrician. The next day, a doctor examined the baby, said she’d likely picked up some kind of bug, and advised giving it a few days to run its course.
Two days later, Francesca had a low-grade fever and was too lethargic to nurse. Veronica and her husband, Sean, took her to an emergency room near their home in Oakland County, Michigan. A doctor checked Francesca out but didn’t see any reason to admit her. However, her cough persisted, as did her fever and lack of appetite. “I spent Mother’s Day trying everything I could to make her comfortable,” says Veronica. On May 14, Francesca was admitted to the hospital’s pediatric intensive-care unit with a confirmed diagnosis of pertussis, the highly contagious disease also known as whooping cough. On May 17, she died.
“This disease came at us like a freight train—there was nothing we could do to stop it,” says Veronica. Except now she knows there might have been something: vaccines.
Pertussis, also called the “100 day cough,” develops when bacteria called Bordetella pertussis attach themselves to tiny hairs lining the upper respiratory tract. It’s easy for them to spread when someone coughs or sneezes, and babies are especially vulnerable. While adults and older children are likely to survive the illness, it is most deadly in babies. “They cough for so long and hard that they can lose oxygen to their brain and simply stop breathing,” explains Julie Boom, M.D., director of the Immunization Project at Texas Children’s Hospital, in Houston.
That’s why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that infants receive a dose of the DTaP vaccine (which also covers diphtheria and tetanus) at 2, 4, 6, and 15 months and then again between 4 and 6 years. Kids should have a booster shot called the Tdap vaccine at age 11 or 12.
In 2012, the CDC also started recommending that women get vaccinated between 27 and 36 weeks of every pregnancy in order to protect their newborn. However, many women don’t realize that. In fact, only about half of pregnant women get Tdap, according to a recent study from the CDC.
Veronica was in the other half. She can’t remember a doctor ever suggesting the vaccine. By the time Francesca was eligible for her first shot, she’d already been exposed to Veronica’s cough for almost a month. “I gave my baby pertussis,” the mom says. “There I was, nursing her and loving her. And I passed this disease on to her and she died.”
Before the vaccine became available in the 1940s, 200,000 people in the U.S. had pertussis every year. The number of cases has been rising again since the 1980s because not nearly enough of us are getting our DTaP and Tdap shots. In 2012, there were 48,277 cases—up from 1,248 in 1981. More than 60 babies have died from the disease in recent years.
Of course, pertussis is not the only vaccine-preventable disease we’re not doing enough to prevent. In the latest numbers available for 2017, the CDC documented 3,299 mumps infections, mostly on college campuses, and 120 cases of measles. These tallies are tiny compared with those before we had vaccines, when mumps was the most common cause of viral meningitis and acquired deafness, 3 to 4 million people had measles every year, and even chicken pox killed 100 people a year.
But experts say these new outbreaks show how pockets of vaccine-skeptical families can put all of us at risk. “We saw 667 cases of measles in 2014. Once you get to 1,000, people start to die,” says Paul Offit, M.D., director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Unfortunately, too many parents are more afraid of what’s in the vial than of the disease it prevents.” In an ironic twist of the vaccine success story, we’d made these diseases so rare that most of us have never seen a case of measles or pertussis up close. But the parents who have watched their kids suffer know better—and wish they didn’t.
Read the full story: https://www.parents.com/baby/health/vaccinations/the-horrifying-consequences-of-the-anti-vaccine-movement/