Childhood diseases are not harmless

By Lois Beardslee

Sun contributor

When I was growing up, “rubella baby” was a term that everyone in our community knew. The worldwide 1963–1965 epidemic of German measles hit Michigan so hard that the Michigan School for the Deaf had to start up a special unit for preschoolers who’d been born both deaf and blind. Their mothers had been exposed to the virus during their first trimester of pregnancy.

With CRS (congenital rubella syndrome), the vulnerable fetus contracts the disease from the exposed mother. Heart defects are also common in such children. Even if a mother is exposed to rubella later in a pregnancy, there can be adverse outcomes, including miscarriage, preterm births, low birth weight, and visual impairment. German measles is so contagious that even up to two hours after an infected person has left a room, nine out of ten unprotected people who enter that room will become infected by contaminated droplets of moisture left in the air and on fluid and solid surfaces. Masks don’t help to prevent the spread of the disease. Immunity is the only way to avoid infection.

Most people who haven’t lived through a childhood disease epidemic have only vague notions of children with spots on their faces, as depicted in sitcoms and cartoons. But preventable epidemics are no laughing matter.

A rubella vaccine was developed in 1963 and distributed as quickly as possible, but in the U.S., approximately 11,000 babies died over a period of two years. Another 20,000 developed birth defects. Every case of rubella varies, and many of us were lucky enough to have mild cases that only included a rash, fever, and runny nose. But I also remember being shut up in a dark room during the duration of the illness, because symptoms more often than not resulted in damage to the retinas and ulcers in corneas, and permanent eye damage was common, as was permanent hearing loss.

German measles continues to be a leading (preventable) cause of childhood blindness worldwide. One out of ten people who contract the disease will develop pneumonia. One in a thousand will die. One out of a thousand will develop encephalitis (swelling in the brainstem). One out of a thousand will develop panencephalitis (brain inflammation) and die, even up to ten years after exposure. The statistics for common measles are even more horrendous. When I was a child, it was the leading cause of death among children worldwide. Believe it or not, rubeola (also known as common measles) is even more contagious than rubella. Both are more contagious than covid.

There are no homeopathic ways to prevent measles. There are only two known ways to become immune from German and common measles. One is by contracting the diseases. People born before 1957 are most likely immune; exposed, but asymptomatic.

The only known safety measure is to become vaccinated. The MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine is one of the safest and most effective vaccines known to man. It is given in two doses, usually 28 days apart. Currently, Michigan law allows parents to opt out of the vaccine for religious purposes. But in order to register one’s child in school, one must provide proof of MMR vaccination or fill out a waiver.

Contrary to popular “theories” that have been disproved by experts, there is no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Autism and Asperger’s syndrome fall within a category of developmental disabilities that appear to be related, because human beings carry over 100 genes for autism. Autism develops during the earliest phases of prenatal brain development and has a 63% correlation with gastrointestinal disorders that are unrelated to vaccines.

We know a lot more about childhood illnesses than we used to. Along with rubella, mumps has also been lampooned in popular culture and media, because it causes chipmunk-like bulging in the cheeks and neck. If mumps occur on one side of the face, up to 13% of boys who contract it are rendered sterile. If the swelling occurs on both sides of the face, it’s estimated that up to 87% of male victims will suffer from loss of reproductive ability.

In my family, for years, part of the transition from early childhood to the privileges and responsibilities of adolescence involved my siblings, cousins, and me taking turns babysitting a beautiful little boy who was blind and deaf. His mother was a distant neighbor, younger than my parents, desperate, and alone. She didn’t realize she’d had German measles until after her child was born and diagnosed. Then she remembered having had a light rash on one arm a few weeks into her pregnancy. The boy’s young father responded to the stressful situation by leaving, and the young mother had no choice but to go to work.

The School for the Deaf in Lansing was a boarding school, serving the entire state. During holidays and summer vacations when the school was closed, the young mother needed in-home daycare. The disparity in wages between women and men in the 1960’s was even greater then than it is today, and she couldn’t afford to pay. So, in spite of the racial segregation that separated our family neighborhood from that young mother’s, family members took turns driving us miles to and from her house, and we took turns teaching each other how to take care of our young friend. We communicated with him by pressing on his palms in American Sign Language. I remember that one of the first things one of my younger brothers did during his stint as caretaker was to invent a sign for “pick up your toys and put them in the toybox.” The young mother was so poor and overwhelmed that there was often no food in the house, and we bigger kids often dipped into our own scant rural teen earnings to buy peanut butter and bread. We added jam that my mum and aunties made from wild berries.

More than anything, I remember the young mother’s sense of isolation and sadness. Her son had a normal IQ, and back then doctors told her not to expect a Hellen Keller-type genius success story. She and her son were going to be challenged for the rest of their lives. Even as teenagers, we knew we were separated from disastrous illnesses like polio by only a few vaccination years. An older cousin had had tuberculosis. Our older relatives had told us cautionary tales about parents keeping their children home, praying that they not become infected. And epidemics often hit Michigan’s Native American communities harder than other communities, because the culture of northern Michigan in the first half of the 20th century dictated closing off roads to infected Indian communities, not even letting in doctors.

The explorer De Soto went up the Mississippi River on May 8, 1581, leaving a trail of measles and smallpox. When his troops came back downriver three weeks later, they described displaced person camps. One of the biggest problems faced by people in the indigenous populations they passed through was coping with piles of decomposing bodies. It’s a history of which contemporary Native Americans are painfully aware.

Even in the middle of the 21st century, we knew we were lucky to be healthy. Helping that young mother was the right thing to do, and I’m grateful that our parents instilled that sense of social responsibility in us. Vaccinating one’s children should be an important social obligation that transcends economic cultural affiliations.