A friend texted me to say that she “got whooping cough for Christmas.” I’m 82 and don’t remember knowing anyone with whooping cough. Maybe it was around when I was young, but my own disease related memories are chicken pox—mom taking me to the neighbor’s house to become exposed so I could have it and get over it; measles, which she did not give to me intentionally, but I apparently caught from that same neighbor; and mumps, which I contracted somehow as a young adult—before 1967, when the vaccine was licensed in. I remember itching with the chicken pox, and I remember being shut up in my parents’ bedroom (on the first floor of our tiny house), with the curtains pulled shut tight against damage to my eyes from measles.
Measles is what killed the missionary Whitmans in Walla Walla. The disease, which is thought to have come back from California with a Cayuse party that had traveled south to get cattle, could not be staunched by Marcus Whitman. Whitman was a medical doctor as well as a missionary, and when patients sent to him died, the Cayuse killed him and others. The disease ravaged Cayuse villages and their numbers never recovered.
There was no vaccine for measles then, but there was for smallpox. George Washington famously inoculated his troops at Valley Forge—crudely—with the ground up scabs of victims scratched into the bodies of his soldiers. A true vaccine for smallpox was developed in England just a few years later, in the 1790s. A doctor found that milkmaids who had had cowpox did not get smallpox. He developed the first vaccine with cowpox matter.
We now know that Europeans had developed some partial immunity to smallpox over centuries by exposure to cowpox, camelpox, and chickenpox. Indigenous Americans did not have cows, camels, or chickens, and the disease decimated them. In 1620, the Pilgrims at Plymouth found food caches left in villages abandoned by dying Indians. And we now think that entire Indigenous populations were reduced by smallpox and other diseases by 70-90 percent.
Demographers argued a hundred years ago about the population of the Americas pre-contact. The “long counters” thought that there might have been 70-90 million—10-12 in North America. “Short counting” anthropologists argued that there were no more than 10-12 million in all of the Americas, that the die-off from European diseases could not have happened so quickly before Europeans started counting populations.
And then word came from a well-documented introduction of smallpox in Russia that took over 75 percent of villagers in the 1700s. Virologists later explained how “virgin” Indigenous Americans reacted to infectious diseases like smallpox and typhoid. Disease “virginity” was in large part due to the absence of domestic animals, original progenitors of many of these diseases. (How that resonates today with avian flu and even Covid.)
Back to today’s whooping cough. The Mayo Clinic says that “About 200,000 cases of whooping cough (pertussis) occurred each year in the U.S. in the 20th century compared with about 5,000 cases in 2020. Likewise, about 21,000 annual cases of diphtheria occurred each year in the U.S. compared with none in 2020.”
Further: “In the U.S., the whooping cough (pertussis), diphtheria and tetanus vaccines are combined into one licensed vaccine called the diphtheria, tetanus toxoid and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine.”
Back to my own early experiences with diseases and what we know for sure is happening today. I did not have polio, but I remember the fear of it, of magazine pictures of children in “iron lungs,” and a prohibition against swimming in our nearby lake in August, during the “dog days” of summer, when polio was said to move more rapidly. I got an early vaccination for polio in the late 1950s, as polio science was growing and vaccines were being developed and tested.
Today, polio is almost gone world-wide, with some people my age and a bit younger who had it as children and survived now experiencing the pain and fatigue of “post-polio syndrome.” The Gates Foundation and Rotary International are leading an effort to eliminate polio entirely. You might have heard about war stoppages in Gaza for polio vaccinations. The disease is remembered enough there to prompt parents to have their children vaccinated in the middle of a war!
Doctors talk about “herd immunity,” and think polio needs an 80 percent vaccination rate to deter the disease, measles 95 percent. I don’t know the figures for herd immunity on whooping cough, but do know that the measles vaccination rate is way down in some areas, and measles is on the rise in America. Epidemic outbreaks are a possibility as the vaccination rate goes down.
No matter what the disease and vaccination rate, some small percentage of people are going to have a negative reaction, maybe even get the disease. But, for most of us, vaccinations are a good bet personally, and a crucial better bet for the impact on our neighbors.
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Image: Native American Netroots
Well I can’t say I don’t think the Whitman’s got what they deserved.
Fortunately I had measles and mumps and chickenpox as a child, I don’t recall the staying away from light though. Interesting.
Blindness was a big fear in our town. I looked it up, and here is what the Ophtamologists say: “Though measles is just re-emerging as a threat in developed countries, the disease has long been a leading cause of childhood blindness worldwide. One study estimates that measles causes up to 60,000 cases of blindness a year globally. Poor access to measles vaccination and malnutrition often correlate with higher rates of blindness in the most affected countries.”