There have been a couple of cases of measles this week in Ottawa, triggered by a kid who traveled to the Philippines (where there's supposed to be an outbreak) and who also was not vaccinated. The local health authorities are worried because some parents are foregoing having their kids vaccinated (even though it was said that vaccination is mandatory if you want to attend public schools) as this hurts the herd immunity.
This got me thinking about all the childhood diseases I got as a kid, back when there was vaccination only for a couple.
For me: chickenpox, measles, rubella, scarlet fever. Also think I had whooping cough. The last one was mumps (got this from my little bro or sis when I was a teenager). My mom used to keep some sort of 'disease diary' where she would write all we caught, along with our weight and height during our younger years. Living in a small apartment, if one of us caught something, the other two soon had it, no matter how hard my mom tried to isolate the 'patient'. Nowadays there are vaccines for most of those methinks. Thankfully I was born a few years after the polio vaccine was developed. My mother had polio as a kid and it left her with one arm slightly smaller and less agile than the other.
And a couple of times some kids in class had lice so I caught them too.
My dad had shingles some years ago and I hope my chickenpox doesn't decide to return in this form one day because it is quite painful from what he told me and what I've heard elsewhere.
This got me thinking about all the childhood diseases I got as a kid, back when there was vaccination only for a couple.
For me: chickenpox, measles, rubella, scarlet fever. Also think I had whooping cough. The last one was mumps (got this from my little bro or sis when I was a teenager). My mom used to keep some sort of 'disease diary' where she would write all we caught, along with our weight and height during our younger years. Living in a small apartment, if one of us caught something, the other two soon had it, no matter how hard my mom tried to isolate the 'patient'. Nowadays there are vaccines for most of those methinks. Thankfully I was born a few years after the polio vaccine was developed. My mother had polio as a kid and it left her with one arm slightly smaller and less agile than the other.
And a couple of times some kids in class had lice so I caught them too.
My dad had shingles some years ago and I hope my chickenpox doesn't decide to return in this form one day because it is quite painful from what he told me and what I've heard elsewhere.
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