6 days ago
I'm a doctor and vaccines changed my childhood. Here's a lesson we all need to learn
By Nicholas Ruddock, Contributor
is a writer and physician whose novels, short stories, and poetry for adults have won multiple prizes in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. "Planet Earth" is forthcoming in November 2025.
To a medical student in the 1960s, the most amazing feature of measles was not the death rate (1 in 1,000) but the paradox of its diagnosis. The child's body would soon be fevered, miserable, covered head to foot in purple-red spots. But other viral illnesses could present like that too, so we were taught to examine, with wooden tongue depressor and penlight, the soft palate, at the back of the tongue. There were the lesions that dispelled all doubt, and they were not red at all, or inflamed. They were white, tiny, looking just like multiple grains of salt. Koplik Spots, they were called, after an observant American doctor. 'Go home,' was all we could say, 'there is nothing to be done, soon the full-blown rash will appear, and your brothers and sisters will catch it too.'
Vaccination for measles in Ontario began in 1970. By 1998, all deaths and morbidity from it had vanished. But this year, south of London, Ontario, 2,500 cases burned through the community, fuelled by vaccine hesitancy. In the province, one death.
