Immunizations and the High Cost of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

    I am from the generation who were exposed to childhood infectious diseases in the early sixties such as polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, and chickenpox, because of lack of vaccines. Polio, in particular, was the most frightening disease parents of my generation were terrified their children would become infected with. I remember being in the first grade and being given sugar cubes with the oral polio vaccine, much to the relief of my parents. To my knowledge, no child at my school did not receive the polio vaccine because their parents objected to it for philosophical reasons. Every parent’s worst nightmare was to have their child come down with this disabling disease and be impacted by it for life.

    My generation lived through the consequences of having limited vaccines. Anecdotal stories from my life include a cousin who contracted meningitis at the age of four years becoming permanently deaf and a brother-in-law who contracted polio at six years whose treatment was placement in an iron lung machine for more than a year. I have personally seen the consequences of infectious disease and how profoundly it changed the lives of these two people. I, too, am also a survivor of an infectious disease: cervical cancer caused by the HPV virus. Fortunately, my disease was caught soon enough to be effectively vanquished by treatment. However, the three years I spent in treatment not knowing if I was going to have a hysterectomy or complications due to metastasis was nerve racking. This is why I work in and am an advocate for immunization.

     In the eight and a half years I have worked in immunization, I have heard countless stories from people who chose not be immunized and bore the consequences of their actions. One woman with whom I was training at a school, told me her daughter contracted measles as a child which developed into encephalopathy causing permanent brain damage. A good friend of mine did not heed my advice to get a PCV13 pneumonia shot (she has an immunocompromised condition); she nearly died from pneumonia last year. To this day, she is suffering from respiratory problems directly related to that bout of pneumonia. During the last pertussis outbreak, eight babies died in California after being exposed to whooping cough. Sadly, these stories do not make the headline news. No one wants to believe preventable infectious disease could happen to them causing, not just disruption, but disability and/or death.

     What does make the news and is spread via the internet is the infamous faulty study by Andrew Wakefield, a physician who lost his license and credibility, for falsifying data linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The damage this man did and continues to do is reprehensible. There are no scientific studies linking the MMR vaccine to autism and there have been many done all over the world. However, there is mounting evidence that autism has its roots in genetic, epigenetic, and in utero causes. For more excellent information about what is scientifically known about autism, one can visit the University of California, San Diego’s Autism Center for Excellence website at:  www.autism-center.ucsd.edu.

     Currently we have a measles outbreak in my city. Anti-vaccine advocates do not seem to understand the serious complications that may develop as a result of exposure, mainly pneumonia and encephalitis. What is even more heartbreaking is the infectious exposure to babies and the immunocompromised that end up hospitalized because of a parent’s erroneous beliefs about vaccines. Additionally, most people do not know the human and financial cost of having to quarantine people, by order of our Public Health Officer, to prevent further contagion of this highly infectious disease. People exposed to measles with undocumented immunity or vaccinations are placed in home quarantine for three weeks or more depending on the extent of the outbreak. In the 2008 Measles outbreak, we had 13 patients who came down with measles and 72 of their contacts in home quarantine for three weeks. This meant no school for children and no work for adults. Add the costs of this economic loss to the monitoring of this quarantine daily (which involves a team from both immunization and epidemiology) the price tag easily goes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly. During the 2008 outbreak, many parents who waived vaccines for their children were outraged that the Public Health Officer had the authority to prevent them and their children from work and school. This is the price one pays for ignorance.

    When one looks at how medicine revolutionized the health of the world, the first thing that usually comes up is antibiotics, not vaccination. The reality is that without immunization, countless lives would be lost to disability and/or death.