Your Doctor’s Orders A blog by Terry Simpson, MD, FACS

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Growing up in the 1960′s I can remember lining up in my grade school and getting some of the first polio vaccines. I didn’t like getting shots, but we had to have them. During my youth I managed to acquire a number of infectious diseases such as measles, rubella, measles, and whopping cough.

But vaccines mean a bit more to me, than to most.  The reason is that my father is an orphan. He was an orphan raised in an orphanage in Seward, Alaska called the Jesse Lee Home.  He wrote a book about his, “Jesse Lee Home: My Home.”   You may recall that home from my father’s book, but more likely you will remember Balto – popularized by Walt Disney.

The reason there were 100 Native American children in the orphanage had to do with outbreaks of infectious diseases that killed many Alaska Natives. Alaska Natives, much like their cousins in the lower 48 (American Indians) have a higher death rate from infectious diseases of Europeans than descendants of Europeans.

Balto, as you may recall, led the sled dogs on the Iditerod trail to Nome, bringing with him vaccines against diphtheria. They arrived in time, and many were saved. While most recall the heroic dog and his master, few will recall that the reason was to bring vaccines to a population that would have been wiped out.

In 1900 1/3 of the population of Unalaska was wiped out from measles, and again in 1919 over half were victims of influenza. The village of Knik, which was, at the time, the largest city in SouthCentral Alaska, with an estimated population of over 20,000 was reduced to three villagers after the influenza epidemic.

These epidemics resulted in a number of orphans, all Alaska Natives, in a time when American Indians were not even granted the right of citizenship in the United States.

We then come to the modern era where vaccines are widely used, and on a schedule, by pediatricians throughout the United States. Vaccinations offer a high level of protection against the disease, and are the most effective mechanism we have to protect people from the virus, some bacteria, and even against other diseases — potentially now with some forms of cancer.

Science, not politics, not celebrity, should determine how medicine should work. Jenny McCarthy has a son who has autism. For a while she proposed that he has some “special” abilities and was in two planes, but now admits that he simply suffers from autism. She relates this to vaccination.

The anti-vaccination crowd states that autism has a striking similarity to mercury poisoning – and will show you charts of patients who have mercury poisoning, and compare them with people who suffer from autism. They relate how the preservative used in the vaccines, thermasol, contains an ethyl mercury — and contend that it is this mercury that causes the damage to the children.

The difficulty with their argument are multiple but here are a few simple ones:

The FDA mandated removal of thermasol from all vaccines in 2002. The rates of autism have not decreased.

When careful examination of children who have autism the signs of it are found as early as 9 months of age, but at one year. Typically it is the second year of a child when vaccinations are administered. Parents see the correlation — a child gets vaccinated and the child begins more overt signs of autism, and seeks to make that correlation.

So while I feel sorry for all who have autism, lets look at what having the measles vaccine alone has done for the population of the United States. It has saved 52 million people from getting the disease that I suffered as a child. It has prevented 17,400 of them from being mentally retarded, and prevented 5200 deaths. Worldwide the estimate of lives saved is over 1.4 million.

There is a concept of “herd” vaccination — that if you vaccinate enough people (typically around 85%) of the population, the other 15% will be so much less likely to get the disease that one can effectively call the disease as extinct. Don’t tell that to residents of Tucson, Arizona. Last year an outbreak was associated with a patient from Europe, and over 500 people were exposed to measles. Some 15 cases were confirmed. In the first few months of 2008 there were 64 cases in the United States, 63 of those were not vaccinated against measles. The problem with the herd concept is when a disease is highly contagous, it can quickly spread through a population and that 15% number become irrelevant.

To have the elimination of a disease that can wipe out a people, as it did in Alaska in the last century, and to not use it represents the worst of celebrity over science ever.

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Tagged: autism, mercury, vaccination

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.