Vaccinations

It is clear now that much of the population was shielded from reality when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s. Yes - polio was the horror story and I can remember it being in the papers and on the radio a lot and seeing plenty of kids with the braces on their legs.

I suppose the then media preoccupation with Polio at the time distracted families from other nasties like meningococcal and measles etc.

Like all kids I knew of my age we all caught German Measles, Chicken Pox, Mumps and Measles - every one caught them and we never heard of kids dying from measles which was much more prevalent than it is now. Based on the modern experience, clearly kids back then were dying, remembering we did not have vaccinations then, but families must have been shielded from this information or being distracted by polio.

The anti - vaccination lobby is bordering on being criminal.

Garry

My father in law is deaf because he had polio as a child.

Because I have travelled to many countries I have had many vaccinations.

Let me think smallpox when a kid, Cholera , Typhoid recently , Yellow Fever ( if you have visited Yellow Fever areas you will not be let back into Australia without vaccination) , Japanese Encephalitis, Hep A ( not Hep B or C as I am not that way inclined) ,recently Pneumonia, Recently Shingles' OH and Tuberculosis and Pertussis, oh and polio

I am still here and relatively sane.
When I was a kid , polio was rife . I had 2 friends with it and my wife had 2 uncles who had contracted it. One left with a withered arm and the other disabled. One of my current acquaintances suffers a seized stomach area from when he had it as a kid.

The modern diseases affected my daughter as her best friend suffered mengicoccal and almost lost legs but recovered. She now has a baby but still suffered blinding headaches. We had an anxious wait, and my daughter was put on a very heavy round of antibiotics.
I still suffered German measles as an adult.
Oops forgot measles, and tetanus plus regular boosters and whooping cough.

So I am all for vaccinations.
Regards PhilipA

The northern suburbs of Melbourne are supposedly an anti-vax hotspot, but that doesn't gel with my experience - there's not a lot of the archetypal anti-vax types around, or not that I've met. I think that the actual issue is that a lot of recent migrants in the area aren't up to date with their vaccinations, that's reflected in the vaccination rates when measured and the journos put two and two together and get five.

I thought that migrants had to show vaccinations records as part of entry, but apparently not.

Then there are the people who say they don't want to poison their kids, but that means they are prepared to have their kids and themselves run the risk of copping much, much worse effects themselves if they get something, plus they wander about irresponsibly infecting others, all because they read some rubbish on Dr Google.

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Originally Posted by 101RRS

..... clearly kids back then were dying, remembering we did not have vaccinations then, but families must have been shielded from this information or being distracted by polio.

....

Garry

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I think there were two aspects to this - yes, we were shielded from the reality; my father lost a brother to diphtheria, my mother lost three sisters to TB. Both the primary and secondary schools I went to had children who used leg braces as a result of polio. But I only learned about my parents siblings long after I was an adult - I knew they had died, but not that it was infectious diseases. My parents were terrified of polio and TB in particular, and I found out years later that my sister was not allowed to visit the house of one of her closest school friends because a sibling had TB. We all had all available vaccinations, but most of the current ones did not exist when I was young. (I am also a 1941 model)

The other factor is that the child mortality figures have dropped markedly in the last fifty years, from 24.9 in 1960 to 3.7 in 2018 (deaths per 1000/annum for under fives). This means that a barely noticeable figure, for example from measles, in 1969 can represent a major incrrease in mortality today.

This reduction in child mortality has come in a large part because of the widespread introduction of vaccination for previously widespread diseases, but also because of improvements in treatments, some of which are cheap and easy - the prime example is that of treatment for gastroenteritis by oral rehydration. Until about the 1980s, this could only be treated by intravenous rehydration - and was the largest single cause of child deaths.

Even though vaccine preventable diseases such as measles caused a small fraction of child deaths in the sixties, that same number represents a much larger fraction of the current rate if low vaccination rates allow an epidemic to develop.

Most people should be aware of the fact that until the 1920s, even in countries such as Australia, about half of all children died before starting school. The spread of safe drinking water and other public health measures, helped by improvements in infectious disease control started the decline of this figure (starting about 1900 in major Australian cities), and better understanding of diet and nutrition continued this decline, and particularly since WW2 more vaccines and there more general availability plus antibiotics and other improvements in medicine have meant that in the last few decades child death from infectious disease has become rare. If the vaccination rate drops, we lose this - measles is the canary in the coal mine - while only 0.2% of those infected will die, it is just about the most infectious serious disease known.

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

my mother lost three sisters to TB.

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I didn't know until recently that streptomycin wasn't used to treat TB (in clinical trials) until 1944. It was only discovered in 1943.

I found that out while checking a comment made in a TV programme about a WW2 mathematician, Richard Feynman, who worked on the atom bomb and whose very young wife had died from TB in 1945.

It wasn't around when R.J. Mitchell (Spitfire designer) was dying of TB in 1937.

Today, we probably almost discount TB as being a deadly disease.

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Originally Posted by p38arover

I didn't know until recently that streptomycin wasn't used to treat TB (in clinical trials) until 1944. It was only discovered in 1943.

I found that out while checking a comment made in a TV programme about a WW2 mathematician, Richard Feynman, who worked on the atom bomb and whose very young wife had died from TB in 1945.

It wasn't around when R.J. Mitchell (Spitfire designer) was dying of TB in 1937.

Today, we probably almost discount TB as being a deadly disease.

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My former GP who started medical school about 1950 once told me he didn't know how physicians practiced medicine before antibiotics. He was still practicing in 2014 aged early 80's. I changed GP's because I thought he was losing it.

My mother's eldest sister died of TB early 1950's. Her outback GP had been treating her for asthma for years and never noticed.

As a couple of our older posters have pointed out, it is very easy to forget, even for those of us who were there, the changes in safety in our society within even the last few decades - I was actually quite shocked to find out how much child mortality had declined in the last sixty years - while I knew it had dropped, my guess would have been that the amount would have been nearer a drop of 50% than by a factor of over six.

Another similar figure, but closer to the major theme of this forum, is the drop in road deaths over the same period - from 28.6 to 4.6 (per 100,000 per annum) over the same period (1969-2018).

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Originally Posted by Bigbjorn

I am a 1941 model. When I was a primary schoolboy there was an epidemic of polio. A rumour of someone being taken to hospital with polio caused near panic amongst our parents. Not to play with kids from that family, etc. Cross the street and walk on the other side of the road past "the polio house". Our parents and grandparents went through the epidemics of mumps, measle, diptheria, whooping cough and would simply not comprehend the attitude of anti-vaxxers today. To them vaccination was both necessary and lifesaving. All primary school students in Qld. were tested for TB exposure and given vaccinations. Compulsory chest x-rays were introduced and mobile x-ray vans were sent around the state until the mid 1970's. Chest x-rays were compulsory for anyone applying for a government job. No argument.

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

I think there were two aspects to this - yes, we were shielded from the reality; my father lost a brother to diphtheria, my mother lost three sisters to TB. Both the primary and secondary schools I went to had children who used leg braces as a result of polio. But I only learned about my parents siblings long after I was an adult - I knew they had died, but not that it was infectious diseases. My parents were terrified of polio and TB in particular, and I found out years later that my sister was not allowed to visit the house of one of her closest school friends because a sibling had TB. We all had all available vaccinations, but most of the current ones did not exist when I was young. (I am also a 1941 model)

The other factor is that the child mortality figures have dropped markedly in the last fifty years, from 24.9 in 1960 to 3.7 in 2018 (deaths per 1000/annum for under fives). This means that a barely noticeable figure, for example from measles, in 1969 can represent a major incrrease in mortality today.

This reduction in child mortality has come in a large part because of the widespread introduction of vaccination for previously widespread diseases, but also because of improvements in treatments, some of which are cheap and easy - the prime example is that of treatment for gastroenteritis by oral rehydration. Until about the 1980s, this could only be treated by intravenous rehydration - and was the largest single cause of child deaths.

Even though vaccine preventable diseases such as measles caused a small fraction of child deaths in the sixties, that same number represents a much larger fraction of the current rate if low vaccination rates allow an epidemic to develop.

Most people should be aware of the fact that until the 1920s, even in countries such as Australia, about half of all children died before starting school. The spread of safe drinking water and other public health measures, helped by improvements in infectious disease control started the decline of this figure (starting about 1900 in major Australian cities), and better understanding of diet and nutrition continued this decline, and particularly since WW2 more vaccines and there more general availability plus antibiotics and other improvements in medicine have meant that in the last few decades child death from infectious disease has become rare. If the vaccination rate drops, we lose this - measles is the canary in the coal mine - while only 0.2% of those infected will die, it is just about the most infectious serious disease known.

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Strewth, how times have changed. I wouldn't have considered either of you as model material. [wink11]