Re: How has the flu season been for you?
Letter to the editor in today's Sydney Morning Herald:
"Adding to comments on vaccination conscientious objectors (Letters, March 27), here's a reality check: acquaint yourselves with one of our living polio victims who unfortunately missed initial vaccination programs, and, know that disabling and fatal polio infection historically occurred in affluent communities.
My mother contracted polio at 23, during the 1956 epidemic, while she was pregnant with my brother. This caused partial paralysis requiring a leg caliper and years of physiotherapy and rehabilitation. While fortunate compared with those left in wheelchairs and iron lungs, the legacy was permanent muscle waste, weakness, contractures, limp, leg shortening, lifelong musculoskeletal problems, and now, worsening post-polio syndrome.
Parents who indulge the delusion their children are so special that they'll leave vaccination to others, and rely on herd immunity, should know the polio virus seeks out, and relies on hosts with no immunity. Past epidemics occurred, ironically, as public health improved. People had previously lived in symbiosis with the virus, so young exposed children self-immunised with asymptomatic infections while still protected by maternal antibodies. But under more hygienic conditions polio found its non-immune hosts, innocently spread by asymptomatic carriers.
As polio hasn't yet been eradicated, how can anyone assume with international travel and migration that it can't still silently travel, including potentially here? Herd immunity wouldn't protect an unimmunised child of the affluent world if exposed to polio virus. Even today. Surely, a crippling thought."
- Robyn Dalziell, Castle Hill
https://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-...inking-anew-20140328-zqnzx.html#ixzz2xKJ1Ezib
