NOT VACCINATING YOUR YOUNGSTER IS LIKE CHILD ABUSE
Failing to vaccinate your children against measles is like driving a car without buckling your children into seatbelts. The consequences can be disabling or indeed lethal. indeed, i believe not immunising your children is a form of child abuse.
The MMR jab, which was introduced in Britain in 1988 and protects against measles, mumps and rubella (german measles), is a safe and effective vaccine.
Yet parents in this country still leave their offspring perilously without protection because they prefer to believe fake news and conspiracy theories that claim the MMR vaccine damages children, rather than the stark reality of this disease.
i’ve seen the true harm of measles first hand. When i was a medical student it was not at all uncommon to see children who’d been seriously harmed by the virus, typically persistent and painfully troublesome ear infections that can cause severe and permanent damage.
a good friend, who is now in her late sixties, was rendered permanently deaf by measles in her childhood.
There can be even more serious lasting complications. Three years ago, a patient’s two teenage sisters were at the glastonbury
Festival when they developed measles. They had not had MMR. They were born at a time when andrew Wakefield’s now-discredited ‘study’ claimed wrongly that MMR was linked to autism. Those two girls ended up in intensive care with encephalitis (swelling of the brain caused by the measles virus) that causes convulsions.
as well as lifelong deafness, this can cause crippling brain damage. There’s no sure treatment for measles encephalitis. Your fate is in the lap of the gods.
The glastonbury girls were lucky to survive – though they’d been unlucky to have a mother who’d believed in ‘natural’ medicine and had refused to have her daughters protected with the MMR jab.
When a child contracts measles, whatever the immediate outcome, they are also left with a lifetime risk of developing a horrific disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
it’s rather like the risk of suffering shingles as an adult, subsequent to having had chickenpox in childhood. The slumbering virus awakes to cause a very nasty condition.
ThEmeasles virus lies dormant in the brain of everyone who has had the infection. With SSPE the virus awakens and progressively destroys nerve cells. This almost always leads to mental deterioration and death. again there is no
treatment. We are just lucky that SSPE is currently rare. Even having measles itself is a very nasty experience. it’s the worst of the childhood illnesses, with its serious cough, conjunctivitis and streaming mucus.
Measles will put a child in bed for some 12 days and then they will take perhaps a month to recover. Effectively that’s a school term lost. and to have it as an adult can be just as bad, if not worse.
The symptoms are even worse in children who don’t have good diets. They are much more likely to die because an infant’s body needs all its immune strength to battle the virus. however, nowadays people just don’t take measles seriously enough, not least because they are unfamiliar with it thanks to vaccines (the single measles jab was introduced in 1963).
When i developed measles at the age of six in 1956 on a family holiday in West Sussex, the hotel manager asked us to leave – that’s how seriously people took the infection in those days – properly seriously.
i have had teenage patients go to the United States to attend university but have been refused admission because they don’t have papers to show they’ve received the MMR jab. They’ve had to fly back to Britain and get vaccinated. in america and other societies they’re taking measles seriously.
i do understand how people can be misled by all the fake news on social media about supposed dangers from the MMR vaccine. Conspiracy theories and scare stories can be very compelling.
But if you want a real story that is both very frightening and highly compelling, then read the science about measles and what it can do to your children.