Originally posted by The Ontarion
When I was growing up in Cuba, I was also raised by one of my mother’s very good friends, Maritza. She was a psychiatrist and other than her characteristic sing-songy voice when she would call out for you in the street, Maritza was recognizable because of her limp. I remember her describing how painful it felt when her calf slowly began to deform. Maritza was about eight-years-old when she was vaccinated with the oral polio vaccine (OPV) – the reason behind her scarred leg and her limp. OPV, also known as the Sabin attenuated vaccine after its maker, is distributed worldwide as it is the most effective vaccine known to eradicate polio. Thanks to this vaccine, India has been polio-free for three years now.
What does it mean when a vaccine is “attenuated”? It is attenuated when it no longer has the characteristics that make it virulent. To achieve the attenuation of a virus, it is grown on cells where it does not need to express “harmful” genes in order to survive, and so it develops mutations in its genome that are typical of a non-pathogenic virus. The virus can then be used for vaccination because the immune system will still recognize it and develop antibodies against it. There are other types of vaccines that do not require a live virus though a live vaccine is usually better at raising an immune response. However, the problem with any live vaccine is that there is the chance that the mutations could return to their original virulent state once the virus is replicating inside the body. Such is what happened to Maritza, and it would be enough to prove to me that vaccines are awful.
I should be jumping in line to watch the next show starring Jenny McCarthy declaring that vaccines are linked to autism. Her ideas, and others like her’s, stem from studies done by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the United Kingdom, in which he linked vaccines to anything from gut disorders to autism. These studies were deemed fraudulent, and were later retracted by The Lancet, where they were first published in 1998. However, much like myths are engraved in popular culture, it seems that his words were the pervasive ones, unlike the countless published articles and numerous data outlining the effectiveness of vaccines.
Maritza was vaccinated along with more than 25 million kids in Cuba from 1962 to 1997; my sister and I are included, having been born in 1988 and 1991. Out of these more than 25 million children, only 18 cases, in which Maritza is included, developed poliomyelitis or acute flaccid paralysis. From 400 yearly reported cases since 1962, Cuba finally reduced the incidence of poliomyelitis to zero in 1997. Having witnessed what a strong vaccination campaign can accomplish, it’s difficult for me to sympathize with the anti-vaccine movement, especially when the incidence of autism in Cuba is one in 1000, whereas in the USA it is one in 68. Vaccines can’t possibly be the culprit. Some have blamed the differences in vaccine formulation. Many of the vaccines in Cuba’s vaccination program are the same as those distributed worldwide, and thus would be the same found in the USA and Canada.
It’s easy to reject vaccines when you don’t have to boil the water that comes out of the tap, or when you don’t have to worry about endemic diseases such as yellow fever or even polio because they have long been obliterated. Ironically, it also seems easy to dismiss illnesses such as the flu which kills 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide. Vaccination does not just help you. It helps those around you by creating something called “herd immunity.” If a large chunk of the population – “the herd” – is vaccinated, the pathogen would have a hard time spreading. Furthermore, just because you do not get the flu, it does not mean you are not a carrier. By getting the flu vaccine, you become part of a herd helping to make sure those with compromised immune systems, such as the elderly and pregnant women, are protected against the flu. Most of all, you would avoid unknowingly spreading the illness.
Comments