Suzette Lohmeyer On Jan. 8, 1929, Dr. L.E. Bensom of Los Angeles used his vacation to mush to native villages in Alaska. At the close of a particularly hard day on the trail, he found himself with 70 patients on his hands, all suffering from smallpox. There were 100 people in the village with no medical facilities. Bettmann/Getty Images
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Vaccines delivered by drones and by burros. People who shout about the danger of vaccines and refuse to get a jab. Public health campaigns to convince the vaccine hesitant. Public criticism of a failure to provide vaccines for lower-income countries and marginalized populations.
On Jan. 8, 1929, Dr. L.E. Bensom of Los Angeles used his vacation to mush to native villages in Alaska. At the close of a particularly hard day on the trail, he found himself with 70 patients on his hands, all suffering from smallpox. There were 100 people in the village with no medical facilities.
Vaccines delivered by drones and by burros. People who shout about the danger of vaccines and refuse to get a jab. Public health campaigns to convince the vaccine hesitant. Public criticism of a failure to provide vaccines for lower-income countries and marginalized populations.
These are all part of the unprecedented world vaccination campaign now going on.
Is It Ethical for Parents to Opt Out of Immunizing Their Children?
Ethical Inquiry is a monthly series that examines ethical questions, highlighting a broad array of opinion from journalism, academia and advocacy organizations. Our intent is to illuminate and explore the complexity of some of the most vexing ethical questions of our time.
January 2011
Child immunization is frequently noted as one of the major milestones in the history of public health. It currently prevents about 2 million deaths every year, and has eradicated the deadly disease smallpox, while polio is heading towards elimination.
It is one of the key strategies for achievement of the fourth goal of the United Nations Development Programme’s Millennium Development Goals: “Reduce Child Mortality.” It is highly effective and costs as low as $1 per child.
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For many midcentury American families, a bout of the measles kids home from school, feverish and rash-covered, eating Popsicles and reading comic books was a rite of passage. To officials looking at the big picture, the public health toll of measles, a common and extremely contagious childhood disease, looked unacceptably high. Measles causes encephalitis in 1 case per 1,000, with further serious complications (deafness, intellectual disabilities) occurring in one-third of those cases. Most kids weathered the measles fine, but there were lots of cases, and thus lots of complications. In the late 1950s, the country saw an average of 4,000 kids get encephalitis from measles every year, while about 450 died.
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The story of Balto, the sled dog heading up the team that brought medicine 600 miles across snowy Alaska to the children of Nome in 1925, has filtered down to us as straight Disney: a kind, brave animal overcoming great odds to help kids. But people who followed Balto’s run via newspaper coverage (or went to see him appear at a department store opening or the Cleveland zoo after he “retired”) were also cheering for a miracle of modern science. Balto and his teammates were carrying a serum for the treatment of diphtheria, called antitoxin. This particular antitoxin came all the way from New York City, where it had been incubated in the bodies of horses residing in a city-run stable dedicated to the production of medicine.