REMEMBER how we were going to eliminate all sorts of nasty diseases by 2000?
Well, on the very eve of that year, in a prosperous European city, my
five-year-old daughter got one of them: measles. There has been an effective
vaccine for measles for about 40 years. And she’d been vaccinated.
It was a mild case and such partial vaccine failure is apparently not unheard
of. Even so, while most of today’s children will be answering the question
“Where were you on the eve of the millennium?” for the rest of their lives in
all sorts of interesting ways, mine will have to say: “I had measles.” Will my
putative grandchild reply, “What’s that, mummy?”
A lot of health authorities would like us to believe that. But I wonder.
These days, when I hear people talk about eradicating infectious disease
so-and-so by year such-and-such, I file it under H for hubris. Sure, the demise
of smallpox proved we can eradicate diseases such as measles that are carried
only by humans. And the WHO has just announced a final vaccination assault on
polio which could lead to eradication. But all the technology in the world won’t
eliminate an infectious disease if the will isn’t there to use it. For smallpox
or polio, the will to vaccinate your children tends to be there. For measles,
where the risk of death or disability is lower, it isn’t, always.
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After all, Jessica had to catch her measles from someone incubating an
infection, probably a non-vaccinated child in her upmarket school. There are
plenty of these people in Europe. Since last April, there have been 2300 cases
in the Netherlands, and three deaths, because some religious nuts refuse
vaccination. In Wales, mothers deliberately throw children’s parties including
kids with measles. They think having the disease is “more natural” than
vaccination—a notion fuelled by a plague of evidence-impaired websites
blaming vaccines for every fashionable ill. They forget that dying of measles is
natural, too.
Such stupidity hurts everyone. You can’t eradicate measles anywhere if you
don’t eradicate it everywhere: Europeans have reinfected Canada and Brazil.
Worse, each sick child gives the virus a chance to evolve vaccine
resistance.
People in rich countries have forgotten what it is like to lose half your
kids to disease. After a few decades of antibiotics and vaccines, superstition
is taking over from healthier fears. I know there have been safety worries about
the combined vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. But there is little
evidence to back those fears, and even fanatics can’t begin to claim that the
vaccine does anything like the same harm as measles, which even in the US kills
three in every 1000 who get it, leaving others blind or deaf.
During the last great measles pandemic of 1957 I was three—and the
disease nearly killed me. When the vaccine was subsequently introduced, it was
hugely popular. Mothers lined their kids up to get it, and I remember waiting
with my little brother, upset at being left out and my parents explaining
why.
We must remind each other what it’s really like to fear such diseases, and
recognise the anti-vaccine myths for the lazy-minded rich-people’s fantasies
they are. In the meantime, stop telling me we will inject everyone with a gene
to end ageing in 2030—if we can’t even wipe out measles today. And please:
mind how you use the e-word.