The legacy of Andrew Wakefield continues

[Hekate]

54. In the '60s I knew a girl who'd had mumps encephalitis. She was blind and crippled.

My sibs and I had every childhood illness that went around in the 1950s and 1960s. My brother Joe would bring it home (it was always Joe) and then I'd get it and our baby sister would get it. We all survived, although measles, mumps, and chickenpox are all painful -- especially mumps. Our baby sister was really sick though after getting mumps and measles before her first birthday. She spent the rest of her childhood as a skinny and sickly little girl, prone to strep throat. Rubella was not so bad, of course, but it was good luck that our mother was not pregnant when we all got it.

So, that was considered routine for those times. We escaped scarlet fever -- which one of our friends had. We escaped meningitis, which a neighbor's child had. We escaped rheumatic fever, which another little friend had. They all were sick for weeks and weeks and weeks at home in bed with the family doctor making house calls, but came out more or less okay.

But what I did not know until I was in high school was that those childhood illnesses could cripple you as sure as polio, could blind you, could kill you.

When I had my own babies in the mid-1970s the MMR vax was as routine as DPT, and I made sure they got all their vaccinations.

This Wakefield character has done immense harm.