History lessons at medical school

I have enjoyed the few history lessons I have received while at medical school. The first was actually one I read about on my own on a study break. It turns out many think that the doctors taking care of George Washington may have sped up his death by "bloodletting," an old practice used to supposedly let the bad stuff out by cutting a person and just letting them bleed. But thankfully medicine has taken a role as a side-kick to science so that scientists do the dirty work on computers, cells and mice so doctors don't do stuff that out-right kills people.

Another history lesson I heard today may end up happening again thanks to Jenny McCarthy and Oprah. First things first: the history lesson.

Back before the 30's, whooping cough or pertussis was a common occurrence, and before antibiotics, it killed 50% of people it infected and infected up to 90% of people exposed to a sick person. Thanks to antibiotics, it only kills 1/500 infected people, but infections last weeks if not months and include a deep, long-lasting (15-20 seconds) cough and possibly neurological problems in up to 4% infected.

But scientists came up with a vaccine and antibiotics for it, and so whooping cough became rare. The only bad thing was the vaccine caused a fever in 50% of immunized kids. One guy around the 80's tried to convince people that those fevers were causing neurological problems worse than what the pertussis bacteria could cause, and a lot of people bought into it. Japan, Russia, the UK, and Australia were a few of the countries that stopped the pertussis vaccine. Unfortunately, what followed were whooping cough epidemics. A disease that annually only hospitalized hundreds of kids across the world skyrocketed to putting tens of thousands of kids in the hospital in only a few short years!

I pulled this graph from an article by a researcher named Gangarosa published in 1998 in "The Lancet," which is a world-renown medical/scientific journal.

It shows on the right how the US kept on vaccinating, but Australia had a huge increase in incidence thanks to not vaccinating.

Now back to what I mentioned about Oprah and Jenny McCarthy, who claim MMR vaccines cause autism: countries like the UK that fell for the pertussis story are falling for the MMR/autism story, and measles vaccination rates are dropping while incidence is climbing just as fast! History is repeating itself, except instead of pertussis, it is measles, mumps and rubella.

What many people don't realize is that even though we may be vaccinated and immune to diseases caused by bacteria and viruses, we still carry the germs! So we can pass along the germs to those not vaccinated without even knowing it...

I've learned a few other history lessons in medical school, but I'll save them for later.