Like Gail Lethbridge (Nov. 9 column), I find it difficult to accept the hesitation, even the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children, when it has proven so successful in the reduction of debilitating and time-wasting diseases such as flu, mumps, measles, chickenpox and rubella.
As we know, the flu vaccine was developed in 1938. The others weren’t available until the 1960s, a little more than two decades after I was a student at a boys’ boarding school, where at the beginning of every school year many of us would be sure to lose valuable study and other curricula participation, as one of the above diseases swept through the ranks.
We’d be confined to the school hospital, to spend two or three weeks in bed, in the dark, with measles, and be forced, seemingly every other morning, to obey Sister's command to swallow a large spoon full of bitter cascara. Good for the bowels, she assured us.
I suffered through all four of these diseases, as many other students did. Fortunately, I don’t recall any serious aftereffects, including death. But now that we have the opportunity to protect ourselves from feeling miserable and wasting valuable school time, it’s certainly difficult to empathize with parents who hesitate, and even refuse, vaccination.
Terry Simms, Halifax
