Parents, don't be immune to vaccine truths

As a second-year pediatric resident, I went to India to work in a hospital in Mumbai. There, among the rows of sick, poor children, were ones dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. Among them, most starkly, was a 9-year-old boy in the most severe stage of tetanus -- every muscle in his body was locked in spasm, the sides of his face pointed upward in a grimaced smile -- "risus sardonicus," as it's known in pediatric textbooks.

His mother's eyes were filled with terror and hopelessness as she sat next to her son, day after day, feeding him drops of fluid with an old spoon to keep him from starving to death. She was poor, uneducated and without access to the preventive care so many of us take for granted here. The boy spent several weeks in the hospital before, by some miracle, he started getting better.

It wasn't my first lesson about the importance of vaccines. That had happened a year earlier, when I was an intern at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, half a world away. One night, we admitted a 9-month-old girl who was having trouble breathing. She arrived with her parents -- Mom in tears and Dad tense with worry. Her parents were movie stars from a Hollywood borough who, unlike that mother from a Bollywood slum, needed nothing. In a way, they had chosen "nothing" for their daughter from the time she was born -- refusing all vaccines for her.

My resident called the pediatric intensive care unit as I stuck a needle deep into the child's wrist, drawing blood from her radial artery to find out just how severe her respiratory failure was.

Her condition, as it turned out, wasn't grave enough to require us to hook her up to a ventilator. Other tests showed that she had an RSV infection, a common, but serious, cause of wheezing in babies.

But she didn't follow the usual course of recovery for children. We began to worry about other serious infections. We called for an infectious disease consultation and ordered another round of tests: We stuck more needles into her tiny veins, and her doctor performed a spinal tap to make sure she didn't have bacterial meningitis.

Late that week, as she was on the mend, we found out that in addition to being infected with RSV, this little girl had whooping cough -- a vaccine-preventable disease.

In truth, it's hard to know which was the biggest culprit, the RSV or the pertussis. My feeling is that if she had only RSV, then she would have gotten better faster than she did, which is what led us to evaluate her further.