Here we go again! Measles has arrived in Canada and will dramatically spread in the next few weeks. Measles immunization began in the late ’60s in Canada and the U.S. Prior, almost all of us got measles. Hacking continuously, we just waited to recover in a dark room, dark because of the extreme sensitivity to light, which was part of the brain inflammation that occurred in every case. For the unlucky few, severe brain involvement progressed to encephalitis, from which a few never recovered, living the rest of their usually short lives in a vegetative state.
Absent experience with measles due to the success of measles eradication via the MMR vaccine, today the public tends to minimize measles’ importance—thinking it’s only an uncomfortable rash.
What’s the big deal? In reality, it is a high fever, hacking cough, mild to severe bronchopneumonia, brain swelling that can progress to permanent brain damage—and by the way there is a rash. Very rarely also deafness and blindness. The claim that the measles vaccine causes autism has been debunked for many decades.v
Professionally, I have had the terrible experience of caring for damaged and dying infants and children from measles in developed and underdeveloped countries. I vividly recall my own experience of measles when I was eight. Now, at 86 years of age, I can still remember the dark room, the fever, hacking cough, the nightmares and hallucinations.
It’s not just measles that we have forgotten. I was born in 1938, and had pertussis (whooping cough) at six months. The DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) was not available till 1948. And us old folks remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in a wheelchair from polio. All that could be offered to my parents for my whopping cough was salt air, so we camped on the beach for several weeks, until I recovered.
Immunization is not a political issue, though some would have it so. It’s a collective, public health issue that requires all of us to protect both ourselves and the community where we live.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana, 1905
