Many of us have had the chickenpox. For you, it may be a distant, vague memory of an unpleasant, itchy period when you had to stay home from school and were too sick to even enjoy it properly.
For me, it was a time when I had to explain to everyone that, yes, 29-year-olds can get the chickenpox, if they haven't ever had it before.
Not so long ago, I was having a bad week.
I was feeling logy and getting this brutal fever that spiked and ebbed like tides in the Bay of Fundy. I was having night sweats so severe that I woke up and had to change all my clothes and drink half a gallon of water to avoid dehydration. And then I got the little blisters, and the other shoe dropped.
I missed nine days of work. I lost a couple of pounds. I was covered in disgusting pustules.
I didn't get itchy, but I spent the first few days of the disease in a blurry fog of antivirals, over-the-counter medications, and cheesy science fiction movies. (Watching Battle for Endor while enduring a high fever is not recommended. I thought an ewok tried to eat my face.) Of course, if I'd been vaccinated, it would have been staggeringly unlikely that I'd have had to endure this nasty little break from work. But back in the 1980s, the vaccine wasn't part of the regime we were all given. Now it's freely available, and trust me, if you haven't had chickenpox,
GO OUT AND GET IT, NOW! We did get vaccinated against a number of other things, starting from pediatric shots up through secondary school, and I had a booster shot a few years back before I visited a camp for children in cancer treatment.
So I've never had any of the following: mumps, measles, rubella, pertussis, or diptheria.
I think that's probably for the best. I'm a wimp when I'm sick with a cold, I don't need a much more serious, or even potentially lifethreatening disease.
And yet there are people out there, thousands of them, who now refuse to vaccinate their children, because of baseless fears stoked by celebrities. No matter how much evidence piles up that mercury in vaccines didn't cause autism, or that vaccines are broadly safe and with a miniscule number of bad reactions, it's impossible to convince some people.
Most of these people refusing vaccinations did get shots themselves when they were young. So they don't remember being very sick as children. They don't remember measles epidemics, or whooping cough that killed children in every community. They don't remember polio - a disease that was almost wiped out worldwide until paranoia about vaccines led to new outbreaks that will leave people disabled for life, or dead. They don't know that our lack of smallpox vaccination scars is a tribute to the eradication of a deadly disease.
It's said that journalism is about presenting both sides of an issue, but that's only true
if both sides can present some kind of evidence. All the evidence in the vaccine debate is onesided.
It's reams of studies, properly documented, versus a group of people who keep moving the goal posts and stoking utterly groundless fears.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a man with whom I thought I shared no opinions whatsoever, is bang on about vaccines.
"It's hard for me not to get very emotional about this, because we know, scientifically know, what vaccinations and immunizations have done for us, personally, in our generation and for generations after us," he recently said. "I frankly don't understand people who are walking away, in our society, from something that's proven to work."
Well said. Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance
