Baby mother who has caught measles prays to other parents to vaccinate

Jilly Moss is the mother of a young baby in London. On April 14, she shared a series of photos of her daughter, Alba, who caught measles and was admitted to the hospital. The images show the health status of her granddaughter after eight days of treatment of the virus by doctors and nurses and demonstrate that this disease is extremely serious and dangerous for babies, young children and immunocompromised.

Measles was, until recently, eradicated in most developed countries. Moss is trying to raise awareness of his seriousness. Too many parents think that measles is basically a rash, similar to chickenpox, something kids can recover quickly after having lifelong immunity. The reality is not the same. It is important that everyone is vaccinated to protect those who, like Alba, are too young or unable to get vaccinated.

Moss opens her viral post by noting that: "Doctors and nurses at Chelsea West Hospital asked if we would share Alba photos to inform about vaccination … She was too young for her. [measles, mumps, and rubella] MMR vaccination when she got sick, which forced her to fight this killer virus without any immunity. Measles is not just a rash, it can also cause blindness, encephalitis and pneumonia. "

The MMR vaccine has had a lot of bad press, starting with the famous work denied by Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license due to a scientific fraud. Wakefield has linked autism and vaccines together, raising fears of a generation of parents that vaccinating their baby would cause developmental regression and catastrophic neurological problems. No scientific consensus links thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, to autism. Despite more than a decade of cautious refutations on the part of the medical profession and the elimination of thimerosal from the vaccine, parents' fears about vaccines have only grown.

Increasing number of vaccine exemptions

In the shadow of these fears, immunization exemptions have multiplied, resulting in pockets of people who are not protected by the vaccines themselves or by herd immunity. And it is in these areas that outbreaks of declared diseases eliminated in countries such as North America are starting to happen more and more often.

The MMR vaccine is safe and certainly much safer than measles itself. Moss, above pictures of his sweet baby with a stuffed bunny in a hospital bed, wrote:

It was absolutely horrible to see our daughter fight that puffy eyes for 4 days. She was in the dark, frightened by a high fever that lasted more than two weeks. At the hospital, it was scanned, removed from X-ray blood, lumbar puncture, fitted hoaxes, samples, Eccos ECG, every 20 minutes, force-fed, by infusion, oxygen, pump filled with drugs, antibiotics analgesics inflammatory that you name it, she had it. The truth is that all of this could have been avoided if the protective layer of older children above Alba had been vaccinated.

The main side effects of the vaccine are extremely rare. The most common are sore arms, fever, mild rash, and joint pain. Compared to contracting measles or causing someone else's negligent infection because of the lack of vaccination, these side effects are much less painful and lasting. Another common myth about the vaccine is that it can cause "viral shedding" (or infect others) and that recently vaccinated people must actually quarantine. It's wrong.

Although measles vaccine is a "live" vaccine, it is an attenuated vaccine, that is, "it contains a live measles virus that has been treated to be weakened so that 'it can not cause an infection, but reproduce enough to provoke an immune reaction and thus enhance immunity against measles'.

The idea of ​​exposing your child to something that could be detrimental and catastrophic to him is terrifying. The fears of parents who are reluctant to be vaccinated are real and should be treated in a rational and compassionate way, rather than making fun of or making fun of.

Indeed, as noted in this insightful article on Vox, written by a person who married a person anti-vaccine, "This is the heart of any real discussion about anti-vaxxers. It is impossible to understand their position without taking into account the amount of fear that characterizes the anti-vaccine narrative and the way people build and manage fear. "

This fear could motivate many people worried about vaccines and learning how to manage this fear and overcome it could be the way to ensure that more children and adults are fully immunized. Adam Mongrain, the author of the Vox article, continues:

Love is rarely enough to appease one's fears: it takes empathy, especially when you want to convince. Refusing to openly discuss, to admit that things can go wrong, to admit that it is possible that we do not know everything: this kind of condescension had not brought me anywhere with my wife and daughter to vaccinations. The broader fight against anti-vaxxers has also not made much progress.

Exposing other people's babies to danger is cruel

In many ways, we have almost fallen victim to our own successes in health care. Vaccines work and work so well that the diseases they are supposed to prevent have disappeared from our collective memories. Instead of knowing the children in our classes who have changed forever with polio as parents, we fear the side effects of treatments designed to protect our children from danger and danger. This false equivalence ultimately leaves more babies and vulnerable people exposed and at risk, without protection from the vaccinated population around them.

It is important to look at images such as those shared by Moss of her daughter, to read the experiences of fear and pain she experienced in the hospital, so that we can remember what these diseases actually look like and help to educate people about the safety of blows. and what are the rare side effects, especially with regard to the diseases themselves.