An Anti-Vaccination Victim Speaks

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The "'70s child of a health nut" (HT: Snedcat), whose childhood bore the brunt of anti-vaccination hysteria questions some of her mother's wisdom:

I find myself wondering about the claim that complications from childhood illnesses are extremely rare but that "vaccine injuries" are rampant. If this is the case, I struggle to understand why I know far more people who have experienced complications from preventable childhood illnesses than I have ever met with complications from vaccines. I have friends who became deaf from measles. I have a partially [blind] friend who contracted rubella in the womb. My ex got pneumonia from chickenpox. A friend's brother died from meningitis.

Anecdotal evidence is nothing to base decisions on. But when facts and evidence-based science aren't good enough to sway someone's opinion about vaccinations, then this is where I come from. After all, anecdotes are the anti-vaccine supporters' way: "This is my personal experience." Well, my personal experience prompts me to vaccinate my children and myself. I got the flu vaccine recently, and I got the whooping cough booster to protect my son in the womb. My natural immunity--from having whooping cough at age 5--would not have protected him once he was born.
I am not so sure that even Amy Parker's words will sway someone for whom facts "aren't good enough", but what she is saying could well give pause to some parents who are genuinely confused on the issue of vaccinations.

-- CAV

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Gus,

A very interesting perspective from the other side of the vaccination debate. Most people certainly don't have any grasp of just how deadly disease can be in the real, non-vaccinated world. Older folks (that is, folks older than me - grin - ) certainly had a different response to disease growing up. Especially fatal disease.

I've had herpes simplex I (cold sores) for as long as I can remember. My sister tell me it was a "gift" from my grandmother who was a chronic sufferer as well. This was the same grandmother who still slept in the same bed with her husband who had contracted smallpox.

I went through the vaccination shooting gallery when I was in 2nd grade. They told us to roll up our sleeves on both sides, and then we marched between two school nurses with the old airguns who would then "hit us from both sides." I know that I was vaccinated for MMR and DPT, but given that we did this little routine twice, I'm not sure what the other vaccinations were for. In addition, I also got the smallpox vaccination. (I find it interesting, when I look at historic photos with women in sleeveless attire, to see how many sport the vaccination scar from smallpox.)

And yet, one of my classmates - we had two second grade classes at about 40 students each - got very sick from one of these vaccination drills and nearly died. She missed about 6 months of school and seemed a lot more frail when she got back. So negative outcomes to vaccination, while rare, do occur. I wonder if part of the problem is that, by treating these things as a compulsory public health issue, no free-market means of mitigation for the bad outcomes has developed, and parents so affected have only the tort system to fall back on when a vaccine causes blindness or paralysis or death. I realize that the odds are in favor of the vaccinated, but that is scant comfort to those finding themselves on the short end of those odds. Is this just the price of good public health that has to be borne by the unfortunate few? Or would there be a realistic free market mechanism that could develop that would provide relief for those on the bad side of that wager?

c. andrew

Gus Van Horn said...

C.,

Your wondering whether a free market solution to vaccine-related problems mirrors mine on other possible ways our lack of freedom might have affected this debate (under the hysteria link in the post), but concerns an aspect I hadn't considered.

Like you, I strongly suspect ignorance of what life was like before widespread vaccination also plays a part.

Gus

Anonymous said...

Hi Gus,

Here's another interesting case where a very important public health improvement had an unintended consequence. Not the type we're presently familiar with driven by ideological evasion, but one in which, with the knowledge available, the outcome was literally unforeseeable.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1527.htm

When I ran across this a few months ago, I was amazed. I had no idea that the widespread polio epidemics were a feature sported by the modern age that was NOT a survival of similar issues before the onset of modernity. It was quite a surprise.

Another thing that this illustrates is the importance of getting childhood diseases dealt with as a child. I remember when I had the mumps how careful they were to keep me away from adults who had not had it. Childhood diseases can kill adults in larger percentages than they kill unvaccinated children.

There's another downside of our present antibiotic age. We have seen a rise in chronic and anti-immune diseases in the last generation. The hypothesis is still nascent, but there is some speculation that some of this may be driven by the fact that children today are NOT immunologically challenged. To wax anthropomorphic, the immune system gets bored and goes about looking for things to do.

Here is a story where a violently autistic young man had his behavior completely moderated by the administration of intestinal roundworms.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/29485/title/Opening-a-Can-of-Worms/

The additional diseases that this immune challenging approach appear to help interested me. I've suffered from ulcerative colitis - which is classified as an autoimmune disease which may or may not be mediated by specific pathogenic infection - for 30 years.

Over the last 10 years, the standard therapies have become less effective for me and I've contemplated a surgical solution.

But, through a series of events including another hospitalization for unrelated issues (and THAT is a story about the value of pre-Obamacare health systems, flawed as they may be) I had come to the last-ditch conclusion to try a procedure from the early 20th century that could be self-administered. In its essentials, it is the direct introduction of new bacterial flora into the gut where they are given a clear field to repopulate it. The theory is that if the immune problem is pathogenically mediated, flooding the field with "good" bacteria allows them to outcompete the pathogens, thus shutting down the immune response.

So I did it. Once. My symptoms cleared within 12 hours. And I have enjoyed the longest respite from my symptoms - 5 months - that I have had in 10 years. I did it against my medical professional's tacit disapproval. And while her nurse still sounds skeptical, my doctor has asked me to write it up. She knew that I'd been keeping an "input-output" journal for the last 15 months and she said she'd like to go over it with me. She said, "Maybe I'll change what I'm doing in other cases."

I'm glad that I've put that life-long malady behind me. But given the multiplicity of years, treatments, hospitalizations, including the Bush-mediated-Medicare-Part-D inflated prices paid for the increasingly less effective drug regimens, I wonder what might have been different had I or my doctor known about this treatment 30 years ago. And while I am happy about my future, I still mourn what might have been, silly as that might be.

It is fairly typical for establishment institutions to jettison the old for the new, once the new has been accepted. It's also typical for these institutions to resist the "new" for as long as possible. I wonder how many ideas that ran against the orthodoxy failed for the lack of insight of "dosing" in the case of the roundworms cited above. And how many failed because the interested parties didn't have the time, money or pull to get past the gov't imposed ossification in the system? Or the outright prohibitions?

c. andrew

Gus Van Horn said...

C.,

The link on polio was fascinating. I didn't know that, either. (Also, I recall listening to Engines of Our Ingenuity on the radio back in my Houston days. It's nice to see that the transcripts are available on the web. I'd forgotten about that show.)

I have been interested in the idea that immunological challenges during childhood may have a role in preventing autoimmune disease or allergies. In that vein, there is an interesting piece in the New York Times that discusses how that might explain the epidemiology of celiac disease in two similar populations.

Gus

Steve D said...

Gus,

One reason people get away with not immunizing their children is because in an almost completely immunized population the consequences of not being immunized is non-existent. If no one around you can contact the disease, they are not going to spread it to you.

So the lone non-immunized person has the best of both worlds – no chance of contacting the disease, no chance of side-effects from the vaccine or immunization process.

There is a certain critical-ratio of people who need to be immunized to eliminate the disease from that population which is considerably less than 100%

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the NYT article. I've passed it on to two of my brothers. The idea that there may be a genetic predisposition is interesting given my own experience.

I have 2 brothers who, like me, suffer from variants of inflammatory bowel disease. My older brother has chronic IBS and my younger brother has a more severe version of ulcerative colitis than I do. All 3 of us have blonde hair and blue eyes.

We have 3 full siblings who have brown hair and brown eyes. They have no digestive tract issues aside from a tendency toward gall bladder problems. Nor is the blond/brown issue age mediated as the phenotype alternates in age pairs; blond/brown. It's almost as if our parents set up an in-house clinical trial!

In light of the immune response theory and my oldest brother's IBS versus the younger siblings' colitis; All of us saw onset in our early 20's. But in my oldest brother's case, it was tied to acquiring liver flukes and giardia while he was living in southern brazil and was assumed to be tied to that infection. In retrospect, it might be those infections that mitigated the auto-immune response.

c. andrew

Gus Van Horn said...

Steve,

Thanks for mentioning the critical role vaccination plays in helping the anti-vaccination crowd imagine that they are doing the right thing.

C.,

Your mention of hair color reminds me of an interesting blog post I once encountered regarding the evolution of blond hair and blue eyes.

I am no expert on such matters, but it seems clear to me that one must consider many things to fully understand immunologically-related diseases, and that one must at the least account for human genetics, how well the immune system has been "trained", AND whatever organisms exist within our bodies to get a complete picture.

Gus