Word: polio
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...Vaccines Though Joel Stein's column about vaccination was clever and in some ways humorous, children being injured every year by vaccinations is not [Sept. 28]. Conventional wisdom, which is what he reports believing in, is not always right. Fifty years of body casts instead of physical therapy for polio victims, thalidomide and its results and the recent speedy rollout of Gardasil - which has already been linked to an estimated 50 deaths - are a testament that the best medical evidence is not always correct. Lynda Lambert, BALTIMORE...
Thanks so much for addressing the vaccination scare stories. My great-uncle died at the age of 18 months from polio. In the 1950s, my aunt died of polio, just as the vaccine was being released. Today children are dying in places where immunization has not yet wiped out the disease. People who don't inoculate their kids should ask their parents what life was like before vaccines. Many can still remember a time when children died in much greater numbers than they do now. Bruce Prickett, FREMONT, CALIF...
...totally get that the idea of injecting a tiny bit of a disease into a child is weird. It's freaked people out for more than a century, often for religious reasons, causing riots in England in the 1850s, a huge uprising in Brazil in 1904 and a polio-vaccine boycott in Nigeria in 2001. Such rebellions against vaccination typically lead to disease outbreaks that put unimmunized kids at elevated risk, and, unless someone does something to stop it, endless New Yorker stories...
...listen to Dr. Lauren Feder. I was doing a pretty good job of distracting myself until Feder told us that a good case of whooping cough can protect your child from asthma, that measles cure eczema and that only 1% of the mere 15% of prevaccine kids who got polio became paralyzed. Feder really sees the good side of life-threatening diseases. I bet she believes Ebola cures wrinkles...
...small intestine and causes gastroenteritis. In June, the WHO approved the first rotavirus vaccine for global use. The vaccine, which in trials in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. cut rotavirus infections by 85%, could someday be part of routine vaccination programs for children, along with those for polio, measles and other diseases whose death rates have plummeted in recent years...