The story takes place in 1940. A five-year-old boy lay in an oxygen tent, struggling to breathe with his mouth open. He saw his lithe toy soldier come to life, striding back and forth across the room, teasing him with his bayonet.
The boy had diphtheria, a disease known as "the Strangling angel". Bacterial infections can cause the pharynx to develop a membrane that blocks the air passage. The diphtheria vaccine was available, but not all children were vaccinated.
A boy lies in an "iron lung" at the Children's Hospital in 1938.
The boy's mother stood by the oxygen tent, despairing because she had seen diphtheria kill other children more than once. Fortunately, the boy did not die. The membrane didn't completely block his airway, and he came out of the oxygen tent.
Later, he went to the funeral of a classmate who had died of diphtheria and polio. Later, he would run with his friend, an elite athlete who had been blind since her mother contracted rubella during pregnancy, shaking rocks in jars to guide her to the finish line. Many of the children he knew during school died of various diseases.
That boy was my father, Tom Keneally.
"Every now and then a church member would show up in our classroom and tell us that someone had died. Then we would chant for them together until the person said, 'God always takes the best kids.' Every time, I'm glad I'm not one of them." 'In children's eyes, these illnesses don't matter because we're just living our lives,' Says Dr. Keneally. But it's not the same for parents, who are constantly worried about the threat to their children."
In Australia, every newborn is vaccinated against hepatitis B and a variety of other vaccines between six weeks and one and a half years to protect against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, pneumococcal disease, meningitis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type B, rotavirus and chickenpox.
Some vaccines can also prevent cancer. Professor Rainer McIntyre, head of biosafety research at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales, said the hepatitis B vaccine protects against liver cancer, while the human papillomavirus vaccine protects against cervical and penile cancer.
"What we have achieved is often forgotten." "In the 19th century, the leading cause of death among children was infectious diseases," McIntyre said. Five out of every ten children could die. The infant mortality rate was really too high."
In 1940, people waited in line to have their children vaccinated.
In addition to the two world wars, Australians in the first half of the 20th century had to deal with "Spanish flu", the Bubonic Plague and all sorts of other diseases that cropped up from time to time.
Suffocating diphtheria, crippling polio, tormenting tetanus... Fatal diseases plague people and put all of their childhoods at risk.
In 1911, one in 30 children died from gastroenteritis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough and measles. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that in 1907 there were more than 300 deaths from infectious diseases per 100,000 people. By 2019, that number had fallen to about 10.
Diseases like polio, smallpox and diphtheria have become unfamiliar to today's parents because of the spread of vaccination. But experts say that while these brutal diseases are no longer killing children, people shouldn't let their guard down.
"To see polio in action, to know that someone has lost a child... These are powerful drivers of vaccination." "Many young people have no idea how bad things were back then," says David Isaacs, clinical professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Sydney and author of Defeating The Minister of Death: a Compelling History of Vaccination.
In addition to diphtheria, Keneally was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1944, sharing a room with a polio patient on an "iron lung" respirator. At the time, the boy was preparing for his high school graduation exams.
"He had a bracket hanging over his head for his textbooks. I remember he was reading Hamlet." 'His mother was always there, flipping through books,' Ms. Keneally said. That's how he learned."
Soon after, he heard that the boy had died because his "iron lung" had stopped working due to a power failure.
Peter Hawkins, a medical historian at Australia's National Maritime Museum, says polio was still killing children as late as the 1950s. "That was the reality of life in Australia at the time. Until recently, people didn't realize how much disease had been rampant. But the consequences of these diseases were less known and less understood than the fear that parents felt when they dropped their children off at school each day that they might never see them again." "Thankfully, there are no new cases of polio. However, there are still many people who are suffering from the aftereffects of the disease and may feel that they have been forgotten by the world."
Of course, there were many victories, especially the eradication of smallpox. In London in the 18th and early 19th centuries, smallpox killed nearly one in three babies, Isaacs said. The World Health Organization launched a campaign to eradicate smallpox in 1967, which eventually succeeded in 1980.
Smallpox vaccination was first introduced in Australia in the early 19th century. Unfortunately for the indigenous people, it was too late. In 1789, a smallpox virus introduced by colonists killed 70 percent of Sydney's aborigines.
Although smallpox has been eradicated, McIntyre warns that forgotten diseases could easily make a comeback if vaccination rates drop. "The post-Soviet experience is a cautionary tale. The Soviet Union had a good vaccination program, but when it fell apart, many of those programs stopped."
The result is predictable. Cases of diphtheria, which had all but disappeared, shot up to 140,000, killing 4,000 children and young adults. "If we stop the diphtheria vaccine, the same thing will happen in Australia," McIntyre said.
"I believe in the power of communication and respect because hesitation has nothing to do with people's intelligence. A lot of hesitation is based on fear and misunderstanding."
Despite their life-saving properties, vaccines are often viewed with suspicion. A tragedy in 1928 affected diphtheria vaccination rates, but may have made the vaccine safer as a result, Hawkins said. "It was called the 'Bundaberg tragedy' or the 'serum tragedy'. A batch of diphtheria vaccine contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus was given in large doses to 20 children, resulting in 12 deaths." "I have to say that if there was a diphtheria outbreak, it would probably have the same high mortality rate," Hawkins said. The incident set back vaccination by several years. But on the positive side, the tragedy has led to improved manufacturing and quality testing standards that have greatly reduced the risk of contamination."
On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared the global eradication of smallpox. A vaccine was essential to the eradication of smallpox.
Sometimes coercive measures may be introduced in response to some people's hesitation about vaccines, but this is likely to backfire. In the late 19th century, Isaacs writes, there were 80,000 strong protests in the English city of Leicester against mandatory smallpox vaccination orders.
"I believe in the power of communication and respect because hesitation has nothing to do with people's intelligence. A lot of the hesitation is based on fear and misunderstanding, and we can't categorize them as outliers because of that." 'If you already have a close relationship with them, it's a lot easier to convince them, which is why I'm a big believer in the family doctor delivering the message,' says Isaacs.
Despite lingering scepticism, Australians are very supportive of childhood vaccination, Isaacs said: "At the moment, routine childhood immunisation in Australia is about 95 per cent, enough to give people herd immunity."
McIntyre agreed, adding: "Australia has a very high vaccination rate, and at 2 per cent, opposition is not that high. They are not so much hesitant about vaccination as fearful about COVID-19 vaccine. But I am confident that we can achieve good COVID-19 vaccination rates."
As for the staunch anti-vaccine people, Tom Keneally says he knows what it takes to change their minds. "I want to take the anti-vaccine people back to my childhood. Every street will have a story that will change their minds."
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