Why Does My Child Need All Those Shots?

The room was suffused with pale light.  There was no noise, no breeze.  Two children lay on hospital beds, sedated.  The only sign of distress would come every few minutes when one of them would tense his whole body, breathing hitching, face clenched.  Both children were almost certain to die.  They had tetanus. It was 1989, and I was rounding with pediatric residents in a hospital in the Philippines.  I was there for a month-long elective during medical school, and spent my mornings learning about diseases we rarely see in the United States.  We rounded on our two tetanus patients every morning, doing what little we could, and waiting.  Finally one morning when we came by, the room was empty.      In the Philippines, vaccinations are a luxury that many cannot afford.  One of the children was a teenage boy who stepped on a pin.  A tiny injury, but the pinhead must have held a few spores of the Claustridium Tetani bacteria.  Driven deep into his foot, where there was little of the oxygen that prevents tetanus from growing, the infection flourished.  The other child was a newborn who had had his umbilical cord painted with a dirty concoction by the village healer. When someone gets infected with tetanus, the bacteria puts out a poison that causes all the body's muscles to freeze up.  Some of the strongest and most obvious muscles are those one chews with- hence the slang "Lock jaw."  In the Philippines, where they have few Intensive Care Units, the best the doctors can do is give the patients Valium in an attempt to help the muscles relax.  The room was so quiet and calm because any noise, any breeze, any stimulation triggers the muscle spasms.  However, such treatment is a fool's errand.  The muscles spasm anyway, most concerning the muscles of the ribcage.  When they spasm, the patient can't breathe.  Tetanus is a slow death of oxygen starvation.  Even with more high-tech intensive medicine in the US, tetanus still kills up to a third of its victims.  In the days before vaccines such infections terrified people.  Diseases like tetanus and diphtheria killed individually.  Other epidemic infections, like polio and influenza, killed in waves.  In 1919, 1 to 3% of the world's population died of Spanish Influenza; one out of every four persons on the planet was sick with fever and cough.  In some places, there were not enough well people to bury the dead.  In 1952 the polio epidemic had every parent in the United States worried that their child would end up a leg-braced cripple, or dead. But these days, such terrors of the past have been forgotten (except in movies like Contagion, which was all the more scary because it was so scientifically accurate).  Vaccinations that prevent such diseases have made us feel safe from deadly infection.  And now, in such an atmosphere of comfort, people forget why we vaccinate.  Some even question the safety and use of vaccination.  Myths about vaccination dangers have become mainstream "knowledge." Here are some more commonplace vaccine myths- all NOT true:  If you take too many vaccines at once, they don't all "take."  Fortunately, this is not how the immune system works- it does not have limited "energy" to take on new tasks.  Another myth is that you can't take a vaccination when you are sick with a cold or on an antibiotic.  Again, the vaccine will "take" and not make you any sicker, except a few vaccines that might give you a small fever. The bigger myths are more scary: vaccines cause brain injury, vaccines poison.  These side effects, if true , are very rare.  Concerned doctors and scientists have been trying for decades to find a connection between these alleged bad side effects and the vaccines, and have been unsuccessful.  Thus this wisdom still holds true: your chance of being harmed by a disease is gigantic compared to your chances of being harmed by the disease's vaccine.  In other words, getting the vaccines is safe; getting the diseases is not.  So make sure your kids get their shots on time.  Get your shots too- tetanus and flu.  That is the best way to avoid.....CONTAGION!