Sex, drugs and snot

Child with severe measles

Subacute sclerosing pan-encephalitis in a child's brain

This week’s edition of Paediatric Grand Rounds deserves particular attention. It has

"sex, drugs, issues of life, death, morality; ethical dilemmas that reflect religious and cultural values as well as the challenges posed by advances in medicine. Because this is PGR, we also have snot, magical thinking and the general weirdness of contact with children."

It has been hosted and edited by a leading British medical blogsite, Breathspa, and it contains an outstanding contemporary review of immunisations and vaccinations.

Did you know that most Google searches on childhood immunistation throw up pages and pages written by the anti-immunistion lobby? And that is what parents read. We need to “encourage” the search engines to produce a more balanced picture. And there is a way we can do that.

If every medical blogger can specifically make reference to Flea’s readable and clearly written articles, Google will do the rest. So here goes:

• A Very Great Fright (smallpox)
• On My Left Shoulder (smallpox)
• The Can From Hell (polio)
• Go Home and Die (Haemophilus influenzae type b)
• Strangling Angel (diphtheria)
• Risus Sardonicus (tetanus)
• The Cough of One Hundred Days (pertussis or whooping cough)
• Dew Drops on Rose Petals (chickenpox)
• Yellow Alert (Hepatitis B virus)

The novels of Dickens, the Bronte Sisters and Mrs Gaskell (amongst others) are full of sickly children or children who succumb to an untimely death. Despite this grim reality, there was opposition to the government introduction of new Public Health measures such as clean water and vaccination. Vaccines were intrinsically linked to civil liberties and accusations of abuse of governmental powers. In 1853 the UK Government imposed an act that made vaccination compulsory. Gibbs countered by setting up an anti-vaccination society of people opposed to the idea of "medical spies forcing their way into the family circle". In 1854 there was a leader in The Times that summed up this attitude with brutal clarity:

The British nation abhors absolute power. We prefer to take our chances with cholera and the rest than be bullied into good health.

So many children’s lives have been saved by immunisations, and still irrational opposition holds sway. Read Flea's articles carefully. Quote them.

And take a look at the rest of the Breathspa choice of articles.