No, Vaccine Preventable Diseases were not a Walk in the Park

Mike remembers his experiences with vaccine preventable diseases very, very vividly, and not favorably. His earliest memories were from mumps. He was only three, but he remembers being very, very ill. He was not hospitalized, but he was so ill that he had to lie on the couch for several days. His memories are vague – he was both young and sick – but he remembers being miserable. He also remembers one scene clearly: “my little sister was jealous of all the attention I was getting and came and smacked me across the face. When you got mumps, that’s a big ouch. She was two. She was toddling, and she just walked over to me and give me a swipe. It was not fun.”

Mike’s memories from having measles – at the age of five or six – are just as miserable. He says: “I remember being very very ill. Anyone who says the measles is not serious just had never had it. I was in bed in a dark room. My mother was bathing my eyes with milk. I was very, very ill with it.”

It was somewhat later when he and his siblings – at that point there were four of them altogether – had chickenpox. Again, he remember it as “terrible” – very, very powerful urge to itch. And “when we couldn’t stop picking the spots we were told not to pick them or we would be scarred for life, but children, we scratched every itch.” They were treated with Calamine lotion – pink and soothing.

Mike also remember, at the age of six or seven – he is not sure – something that was originally thought to be meningitis, but may have been something else. He describes what happened: “I went on a bus trip to a local seaside resort, and we got there and I was too ill to get off the bus. I sat on the bus with my grandmother, and we sat there all day until it was time for the bus to go back home, and the next day I was in an isolation hospital. We have these hospitals which were part of the National Health Service, they were built separately and apart from all the other hospitals and when children got infectious diseases for which there was no cure they went there. They were originally built as sanatoria for TB victims or isolation hospitals for smallpox or cholera in the Victorian era. They were taken over by the NHS in 1948 and most were closed or repurposed over the next 50 year as these and other infectious diseases declined.

And I was there and I remember tubercular injections, I’m not sure what it was, it might have been penicillin or something, regular injections every four or six hours. I vividly remember the doctor coming in to say I was going home tomorrow, and then the nurse came after him to give me my injection and I said ‘no, no more injections, I’m going home tomorrow.’ My poor little bottom was like a pin cushion.”

Mike doubts it was meningitis, because he says: “I doubt if I had meningitis after sitting on a bus for a day if I’d be here to tell the tale.”

Mike says, “One disease remained a real fear when I was a child in the 1950s. Polio. We all knew about iron lungs and had seen children in callipers.”

Mike remember his childhood as a time when “children did get ill, they got ill on a regular basis, and not everybody did survive. I think I was one of the lucky ones.”

He does remember getting some vaccines – the pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccine, and the vaccine against Tuberculosis. He says: “I remember lining up to get it and everyone that came out pretended it really, really, really hurt to make the rest of us feel really scared. It hurt a little bit but when you came out you pretended it really, really hurt as well. Walking past this pale, frightened line of children moaning and staggering.”

There were also smallpox and polio. “We liked the polio vaccine.” Says Mike. “It came on a sugar lump not a needle!”

Powerfully aware of the potential suffering caused by preventable diseases, Mike views the anti-vaccine movement as stemming, in part, from lack of knowledge about the risk those parents are taking. He says: “One of the problems I have with it is that the people who are campaigning against the vaccines have no experience with the diseases themselves. Unless, that is, those people who remember Measles, Mumps and Chickenpox as minor childhood ailments are remembering them in comparison to the really deadly diseases like smallpox, diphtheria and polio that were conquered by vaccination during the 50s and 60s."

He himself knows better. 

“When I became a parent and had my own children, it felt so good that I could take them to the doctor and have them vaccinated against these diseases and know they weren’t going to get them.”