Perspective: My parents didn’t tell me they skipped my vaccines. Then I got sick.
By Josh Nerius Josh Nerius is a software product manager from Chicago. April 25 at 9:51 AM In May 2016, I’d been feeling sick for a few days. My doctor diagnosed strep and sent me home with antibiotics. But this wasn’t like any strep I’d ever had before. My sore throat and fever kept getting worse, and I developed a rash on one of my arms. Then, one morning, I collapsed onto the floor of my apartment. The emergency room doctors took blood and ruled out strep.
Once my temperature fell and blood oxygen levels rose, the hospital released me with strict instructions to stay home. But before I’d become ill, I’d gone to a tech conference in Las Vegas, with tens of thousands of attendees. I had no idea how many people I’d met, shaken hands with or brushed up against. Measles is so contagious that if one infected person is in a room, 90 percent of the unvaccinated people around him will also become infected.
It took me months to feel even close to normal: My heartrate was unusually elevated and I was fatigued. During that slow recovery, I had a long talk with my parents to try to understand my medical history. It turned out that I had never been vaccinated against any infection — not measles, not polio, not tetanus — in my thirty trips around the sun. It’s hard to draw out the specifics of their beliefs, or drill down to the root cause of their immunization denial.
In the first few months of 2019, the United States has had its highest number of measles cases in the past five years: 673 reported in 22 states. That total may rise, especially because the number of people claiming vaccine exemptions for nonmedical reasons has increased over the past decade. Vaccine skeptics brush off measles as a once common “childhood illness,” making it sound like a manageable nuisance — a rite of passage, even.
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