Battling ignorance for a better life - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
It was sad to hear that there were 173 new cases of measles reported last week in Ontario, bringing the total for this year to almost 800.
Authorities were fairly confident that measles had pretty well been wiped out, thanks to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, but apparently many of the Ontario patients were in an area of southwestern Ontario where one particular religious denomination doesn’t believe in vaccinations.
For someone my age, this is sad. I lost an older brother, before my father went off to fight in World War II, when he died of measles when he was less than six months old. It gives particular meaning to the fear my mother must have felt when I contracted red measles in the 1950s. I remember her curtaining off part of our living room to protect my eyes from the light, and bringing my bed downstairs so she could call on me regularly without having to climb the stairs.
But I also lived in an era in the 1950s and 1960s when our world was changed by hundreds (or thousands?) of scientists who invented various vaccines to protect us from infection by various infectious illnesses. I remember in reading the book Before the Ages of Miracles by my childhood physician, Dr. William Victor Johnston (born in West Wawanosh), of the miracle, for instance, that the death toll from polio went from 228 in 1959 to zero by 1963, thanks to a vaccine. Deaths had been as many as 2,544 in 1937.
Dozens of other illnesses that are now unheard of were still in effect in the 1950s. Only a couple of years ago I underwent a heart-valve replacement for a faulty valve damaged when I had rheumatic fever as a child. This disease was virtually wiped out with the use of penicillin, which began after World War II.
Given all this progress, it’s concerning that vaccine resistance on the part of a religious group should keep worry over a disease alive. Also of concern is the fact that many young people who would normally have been vaccinated missed out because of restrictions on getting out and seeing others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
More concerning is the situation among our neighbours to the south, where a similar outbreak of measles occurred in Texas. There, the attitude of current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., raises alarm over vaccines despite the best advice of medical experts. (One wonders what his father, the assassinated, forward-thinking attorney general would think.)
And then there’s U.S President Donald Trump who cast doubt on the value of the COVID-19 vaccine when it came out during his
first term. According to Johns Hopkins University, the total death toll of the pandemic in the U.S. stood at about 919,000, compared to 35,500 in Canada, Even given that the population of the U.S. was eight times that of Canada, the death toll south of the border was more than three times higher than here in Canada.
The destruction of the current Trump government goes further. As he battles against Harvard University for not giving him the names of foreign students so he can investigate to see if they protested, say, against Israel and in favour of the Palestinians in the current war, he has cancelled nearly 1,000 research grants worth more than US$2.4 billion.
All of us in the world benefit from research done at universities like Harvard, which has come up with these miraculous cures for diseases. Further, President Trump has moved to prevent all foreign students from studying at Harvard, unless court challenges
prevent him. Among the foreign students who could be banned is Prime Minister Mark Carney’s daughter Cleo, one of almost 6,800 foreign students who would be affected.
It’s hard to figure out which is the greater tragedy: the ignorance that kept humans from finding effective preventions of these terrible diseases or the stubborn streak of modern humans who refuse to recognize the dangers of diseases for which there are vaccines for prevention. In the current measles outbreak there have been two totally-preventable deaths in Texas.
An older brother of mine died of measles. Who knows what he might have accomplished if he had lived? Who knows what the thousands who died because of COVID-19 might have accomplished if their lives hadn’t been cut short?
I have been so blessed in my lifetime through the long, agonizing research carried out by dedicated scientists (like the heart-valve replacement which extended my life), that I find it tragic to think that ignorance could harm the future of many.
Let’s not let false beliefs ruin the glorious future of our fellow humans.