Readers recall the suffering of vaccine-preventable diseases

In last week’s newsletter, I asked readers who remember the days before routine childhood immunizations to share their stories from that time. Doing so, I believe, is our best chance to convince those who remain unsure about vaccines of their necessity.

Deirdre from Maryland was a pediatric nurse during the 1970s. She recalls caring for children devastated by diseases that are now vaccine-preventable. They were “dependent on tube feedings and having intractable seizures,” she wrote.

The dean of her nursing school was wheelchair-bound from contracting polio as a student nurse. She also remembers learning that there were special college scholarships to encourage students to major in audiology because there were so many kids who lost hearing as a lasting consequence of contagious illnesses.

“The ultimate irony of the success of childhood immunizations is people under 60 have no memory of the lifelong disabilities children and adults had as a result of these diseases,” she shared.

Peg from Massachusetts also urged people to consider the consequences to babies born to women who contract the diseases during pregnancy.

“As a pediatric audiologist, I have seen hundreds of cases of deafness, blindness and cognitive impairment in children whose mothers contracted rubella during pregnancy,” she wrote. “These cases came to a near standstill after the widespread use of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.”

Like Ina Pinkney, whom I had the honor of profiling in my column last week, Susan from Arizona is a polio survivor. She contracted the virus in 1946, nine years before the first polio vaccine was made available.

She recalls that there were children in hospital wards who eventually stopped crying after repeated pleas to see their parents could not be met. Parents climbed on ladders outside hospitals to try to get a glimpse of their children.

Now retired from her career as a nurse-educator, Susan describes her mother as being “shamed, blamed and marginalized” because of her daughter’s illness. On the day her mother died, she learned that her mother was haunted by the guilt that she was the one who gave her daughter polio.

“Although we shared the lifetime emotional pain of polio, we did not talk directly about this until the evening of her death,” Susan wrote to me. “Talking openly would have been too painful.”

Ruth from Virginia also shared a moving story about a family member — her little sister, Beth, who was barely a year and a half old when she contracted measles in 1949. Ruth believes her sister was exposed to the virus at a doctor’s office.

“One night when my brother and I were asleep, our parents brought her to the hospital,” she wrote. “Either that night or the next, she died.”

Ruth recalls being in her parents’ bed the next morning crying with her younger brother. “I have carried that grief around me ever since,” she wrote. “I am now 84 years old.”

It is jarring every time she hears anti-vaccine comments. These individuals, she believes, are ignoring the impacts on the family when a child dies. To go through this grief before vaccines were available was a terrible tragedy. It is many times worse now that we have the tools to avert such suffering and death.