It Took Two Months and Nearly a Million Dollars to Save an Unvaccinated 6-Year-Old From Tetanus

[littlemissmartypants]

It Took Two Months and Nearly a Million Dollars to Save an Unvaccinated 6-Year-Old From Tetanus

A new case report from the Centers for Disease Control released Thursday starkly highlights the costs of not vaccinating children. It details an unvaccinated 6-year-old boy’s encounter with tetanus—and the hugely expensive, two-month-long effort it took to save his life.

Tetanus is caused by the namesake bacteria Clostridium tetani. More accurately, it’s what happens when the soil-loving C. tetani gets into your body—usually through an open cut—and spews out an extremely potent toxin. This toxin can quickly paralyze and send your muscles into constant spasms, beginning with the jaw (if you know anything about tetanus, it’s probably that it causes lockjaw). These spasms can then spread to the chest, back, and gut, leading to painful fractures, problems breathing, and even the complete loss of bowel control. It’s a brutal disease, one that can take months to fully recover from. Even with treatment, 10 percent of victims ultimately die.

Thankfully, we’ve had a working vaccine for tetanus since the 1920s, and vaccination has virtually eliminated the disease in countries with decent healthcare. Most every person in the U.S. is fully vaccinated for tetanus by the time they enter school, with the first of five shots happening at the age of 2 months (booster shots every 10 years afterward are recommended). Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for the unnamed child in this report, since his family had chosen to not vaccinate him for any condition.

According to the authors, the 6-year-old boy from Oregon had gotten a forehead scrape while playing outside on a farm sometime in 2017. The wound was cleaned and sutured at home, but six days later the boy began experiencing lockjaw and muscle spasms. He then started arching his back and neck involuntarily and eventually could barely breathe, prompting his family to call for help.

More info at the link.

https://gizmodo.com/it-took-two-months-and-nearly-a-million-dollars-to-save-1833137421

[marylandblue]

1. Horrible story, and at the end it says the parents still won't vaccinate

I don't get it. How can you watch your child go through that and still not vaccinate?

[Archae]

2. Willfull stupidity.

[littlemissmartypants]

13. Sociopathetic stupidity was what I was going to say, but you beat me to it. nt

[lastlib]

64. Parental malpractice!

I LOATHE these people who are so willing to condemn their children to disease and even, in some cases, horrible deaths! ---

LOCK 'EM UP! It should be a criminal offense to fail to vaccinate!

[Stargazer09]

9. It makes no sense

The poor kid suffered through all of that pain, yet the parents would still be willing to let him (and possibly his siblings, if he has any) go through another medical version of hell in the future. All because vaccines are so “evil.”

I just don’t understand why anyone would do that to a child.

[Volaris]

22. Because they're self-important assholes,

And therefore, they put their own image of themselves ahead of the legit needs of their offspring.

[FiveGoodMen]

23. Bingo!

[Stargazer09]

61. Exactly!

I feel sorry for the kids. The parents deserve to suffer.

[Volaris]

66. The parents aren't gonna suffer, they all GOT their shots.

[trc]

25. I am willing to bet this family did not pay the full medical bill, the article does not say.

Since their are no consequences to the parents other than the inconvenience of a hospital stay, they can be arrogant in the face of their children being harmed. If they paid the bill in full, and I think this is one of those times that an insurance company has the right to question paying the claim, then I will feel like a horrible, judgemental person...but I think I am safe. If you are seriously injured base jumping from a place you are repeatedly told is dangerous, insurance should not have to pay for your stupidity. I believe the same applies here. When I pay into insurance to spread risk of every day accidents to me and others and share in their risk, I am fine with that. But when one of the insured chooses to ignore 100 years of science and lives a life at much higher risk than most in the insurance pool, they should either not be covered for those choices or pay substantially more in premiums.

[Norbert]

63. If I choose to smoke my health insurance would almost double

I would have to think, even if they have 80:20 insurance paid through the company they work for, I would think their insurance premiums would raise significantly. After all, their health insurance is stuck with an $800K bill as a result of their choice.

[workinclasszero]

48. Naked child abuse

Why aren't the parents in jail yet?

[Farmer-Rick]

3. They live on a farm, cleaned the wound at home and didn't get him vaccinated?

That's just tetanus waiting to happen.

I stepped on a rusty nail that went through my thick sole boots and through my foot (hazards of working on an old farm). It took a year before I could walk normally on it again. But I didn't get tetanus because I keep my shoots up to date. Why would anyone take such a risk with their child's life? Stupid parents.

[BSdetect]

4. I am allergic to tetanus (or is it anti-tetanus). Not sure what the alternatives are

Took me 12 years to stop Kaiser reminding me to get a tetanus shot.

The course of treatment to counter-act the tetanus shot was over a few months and involved about three injections.

However, I am totally in favor of vaccinations.

[Mariana]

11. That's awful.

Maybe your doc would be able to give you some information about what kinds of wounds are most likely to lead to a tetanus infection, and what you can do to avoid tetanus if you get that kind of wound.

[Arkansas Granny]

5. I sometimes wonder if parents who don't vaccinate their children really understand the risks

they are taking with the lives of their children. From remarks I've heard from some of them, they have never seen the effects that childhood diseases can have. I'm sure that they have never known anyone who died or nearly died from measles. I'm sure that none of them know anyone who had polio as a child.

My mother thought I was dying when I had measles and I can remember the widespread fear of polio outbreaks when I was a kid. I went to school with kids who could barely walk on their own and had to wear heavy metal braces on their legs.

Their ignorance can have devastating consequences for their children.

[Stargazer09]

10. We need mandatory educational films

Fewer people would be anti-vax if they truly understood what the diseases can do to a human body.

The only problem is that so many people have been brainwashed to believe government agencies like the CDC are full of liars trying to push Big Pharma on the country.

Also, the vast majority of the idiots who refuse to vaccinate are already vaccinated. So they have a much lower risk of personally suffering for their decision to not vaccinate their kids.

[Hekate]

33. That's been the missing link: education that includes pictures and videos...

Every damn time my local station covers anything to do with vaccination, you can bet there will be half a dozen pictures of a baby getting stabbed with a long sharp needle and none at all of a kid sick with a preventable disease.

When I go to my dermatologist's office, he has a rack of pamphlets describing various gruesome skin ailments, including untreated skin cancer. In living color.

Decades ago I went to a community clinic for gyn care, and there was a similar rack of informational pamphlets. What I learned about VD while innocently waiting for my Pap smear was eye-opening, to say the least.

I keep imagining (hoping) that pediatricians' offices do the same.

But I'm a reader, and I just pick things up and read them. I think most people need videos.

In the 20th century Science succeeded in vanquishing so many terrible diseases that it was like a dream come true. Where we failed was by not teaching the next generation about what came before them. It needs to be part of the middle school/high school curriculum. With videos of really sick people -- not just plump happy babies getting stuck with big needles and bawling from the temporary owie.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

46. show the consequences!

I think you're exactly right. All of my local, broadcast tv stations do just as you describe -- they show "a baby getting stabbed with a long sharp needle and none at all of a kid sick with a preventable disease."

Tv *can* educate; the producers and directors just need to choose to do so.

[Mariana]

50. They showed some pretty gruesome vids in my driver's ed class.

So, it's not like that kind of thing has never been done before. That was a required class in a public school.

[Stargazer09]

62. You are so right!

I hate the message being sent by the big needles and crying babies.

They need to show videos of newborn babies with whooping cough. If that doesn’t send anti-vax parents running to get their babies vaccinated, nothing will. Those videos make me cry every single time.

[dawg day]

54. If schools refused to admit children who aren't immunized...

.. and childcare providers (except for genuine health exemptions),
and colleges and universities didn't let students in without proof of immunization...

I think most of this would end. Some religious resistors might hold out, but these granola-liberals? They'd cave as soon as Darling Shay couldn't get into the nursery school.

My great uncle died of lockjaw... in 1920.

[Hekate]

65. On the contrary, they homeschool. nt

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

57. I think that's the missing piece of the puzzle of why people don't vaccinate.

I'm in the generation that got all the childhood diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox. Honestly, I never knew anyone who suffered bad consequences of those, but that's probably because we all got them and the bad consequences, while real, are still relatively rare.

I was in 2nd grade when the Salk vaccine came out. One of the boys who was in my kindergarten and 1st grade class (we moved to another city after that) had had polio and had a major brace on one leg. Over the years I've known others who had polio, including an 8th grade teacher and my late father-in-law.

The DPT vaccine was around for me. I recall my mother, who was born in 1916, mentioning once or twice of a cousin who died from diphtheria. It was when she was a child, and so long ago it meant nothing to me.

My own two sons got the MMR, although they were a bit too soon for the chicken pox vaccine, and so went through that. Luckily for them it was no big deal.

My older son is mildly autistic, Asperger's, and among the many things that can enrage me is the suggestion that it's from vaccinations. I can assure you he was different from the day he was born. Whatever the source of his Asperger's, it sure as hell wasn't vaccines.

Slightly more to the point, the young parents today were themselves vaccinated, and didn't even go through mild bouts of those diseases, let alone the more devastating versions.

Here's something else that I think may be a factor: Babies do inherit a certain amount of immunities from their mother, which are apparently reinforced if the mother nurses them. So a nursing infant will have a degree of immunity early on from some diseases. And here I'm talking about a world in which there are no vaccines, and those kids will eventually get those diseases. I rather suspect that now that we've had nearly two generations who've mostly been vaccinated, there simply isn't that pass-on immunity. Which means the vaccines are even more important for babies.

Please note, that while I'm acknowledging that the immunity you get if you get the disease is a life-long one, I'm not advocating forgoing the vaccines. For that, I will simply bring up smallpox. Yeah, you get it and if you survive you'll never get it again, but in all likelihood you'll be disfigured from the scarring. I have read more than once that a woman, back in the pre-smallpox vaccination day, who was not scarred was automatically considered beautiful.

[gordianot]

6. Antivaxers are the most frustrating people you can encounter.

They have been around for decades and I encountered them several times. Fact is everything a living organism does; eats, breathes, drinks is a potential risk. What you do not do when there is solution is a greater risk. These people avoid reason.

[Mariana]

14. They've been around much longer than that.

I was reading some Providence, Rhode Island newspapers from 1895 and 1896, following a story that happened there at that time. One of the things I saw and read while searching for pieces on that story was an editorial essay that strongly condemned the state's plan to require immunization for public school students against smallpox. I wish I could remember in which issue I found it.

[gordianot]

17. My favorite is do not resuscitate orders for medically fragile children.

It happened only once at a bus accident I got reamed out by a parent when the ambulance crew attempted to revive their child they apparently did not want treated. After that they attempted to impose orders not to attempt to treat their child at school “call an ambulance” in case of serious accident. Thankfully in our State such orders are legally worthless but was told in some States they are binding.

[Hekate]

36. One of Gutenberg.org recent acquisitions in e-books was an anti-vax book from that era...

Last edited Fri Mar 8, 2019, 04:10 PM - Edit history (1)

I didn't download it so can't recall the title, but it's out there all right.*

Nonetheless, Smallpox vaccinations of a sort have been around a couple of centuries, afaict. I remember reading of a British family (stationed somewhere in the Near East) in which the wife availed herself of treatment given by a local midwife who used a sewing needle scratch to transfer matter from a pustule to the healthy woman. She became pretty sick with a fever, but did not get full-blown smallpox, and was thereafter immune. It was risky, but not as risky as falling sick in an epidemic.

* Found it.


Vaccination a Delusion
Its Penal Enforcement a Crime:
PROVED BY THE OFFICIAL EVIDENCE IN THE REPORTS
OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION
BY
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
LL.D. DUBL., D.C.L. OXON., F.R.S., ETC.
1898

I love the Transcriber's Note from 2019:

Transcriber’s Note: Vaccination is not a delusion. Thanks to vaccination, killer diseases such as small-pox, polio and tetanus have been more or less eliminated. The supposed link between vaccination and autism comes from one fraudulent study which actively falsified its data (BMJ 2011; 342:c7452). If you’re reading this with the aim of justifying not vaccinating yourself or members of your family, stop right there and go and read some modern-day science instead.

[Mariana]

39. What I remember is that this essay really covered the bases.

There was the railing about injecting poison into children's bodies. Also that vaccination subverts God's will. Oh, there was the eugenic argument too, that it's better that the "weaker" people who die of smallpox are removed from the gene pool. I'm paraphrasing, of course.

[Hekate]

40. Found the book I referred to and updated my post. Loved the Transcriber's Note, which I included. nt

[Mariana]

43. Wallace wrote that?

Do you know who Alfred Russel Wallace is? He discovered Natural Selection the same time Darwin did. He and Darwin published the first paper on it jointly, before Darwin's book came out!

I have to read it now, to see what his arguments were. Not that he'll convert me or anything, but I'm very curious.

[Hekate]

45. Oh! No, I didn't know who he was. Sometimes I learn the darndest things here.

[littlemissmartypants]

58. The collective intelligence of DU is legendary. nt

[spanone]

7. I hope the bill went directly to the parents. Can these people get insurance?

[Baitball Blogger]

12. I hope they get the bill too.

[sinkingfeeling]

8. It would be fitting if family had to file for bankruptcy. But probably

an insurance company will pay the bills (I don't see why they couldn't deny payment in this case since they can deny others major surgery or high priced drugs.) and then raise their rates for all their policy holders.

[Mariana]

15. That may be the thing that would get these people to vaccinate.

If the insurance companies all instituted a policy that they won't pay penny one for treatment of diseases for which vaccines are available, but the person who got the disease wasn't vaccinated, unless there was a valid medical reason not to take it.

[Lonestarblue]

24. Agree!

Life choices have consequences, which is why you can get insurance discounts for choosing not to smoke. At the very least, those who refuse to vaccinate their children for no reason other than believing hoaxes should be required to pay much higher insurance premiums so the rest of us don’t have to cover their children’s treatment for preventable diseases. Some pediatricians in my area have announced that they will refuse to see patients who have not been vaccinated because just having them in their offices poses a huge risk to children whose immune systems do not allow then to be vaccinated. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children without a valid reason are being extremely selfish and seem to think it’s okay to endanger other children’s lives.

[Mariana]

42. They're endangering some of the vaccinated people, too.

No vaccine is 100% effective. I was vaccinated for measles and it didn't take, and I got measles from an unvaccinated person in 1973. One of my classmates got it, too. Fortunately, the rest of the students were immune. Anyway, supposedly I had a mild case but let me tell you it was horrible, and it took me a long time to completely recover. It wasn't my parents' fault, they got me the vaccine, it just didn't work for me.

[justgamma]

26. They are probably anti socialist.

Running to an insurance company where everyone will help pay their bill.

[Mariana]

16. "The wound was cleaned and sutured at home..."

Seriously? And they didn't take him to a doctor when he first started having weird symptoms, they stood by and watched until he had trouble breathing. And now the kid still isn't being vaccinated for anything. He needs to go live with relatives who are sane, or go into foster care. The people he's living with now are dangerous.

[SunSeeker]

21. Anti-vaxxers probably knew a doctor would insist on a tetanus shot.

I know when I cut my hand gardening, the urgent care doctor insisted I get a tetanus booster (and he got no argument from me!).

Poor kid. This is horrible child abuse.

[Mariana]

44. I can't believe they haven't been arrested and charged.

Who sews up a kid's gash at home? They may have introduced the tetanus, or created the conditions that caused it to thrive! And what did they give him for pain, if anything? This is just sickening.

[SunSeeker]

49. Good point! Their unlicensed practice of medicine butchery itself could have imparted tetanus.

[EveHammond13]

18. doing my family research on ancestry, I found a 15 year old relative who died from tetanus

in 1930.

He was playing with a toy metal gun that exploded in his hand.

There are reasons we vaccinate.
There are reasons we have safety regulations for products.
It's called the modern world.

[dlk]

19. There is a Cultivated Ignorance that Creates these Situations

There are those who, unfortunately, would rather be right than deal with facts and reality.

[SunSeeker]

20. K & R for exposure of anti-vaxx child abuse.

[RockRaven]

27. Non-evidence-based vaccine exemptions/refusals for minors are immoral, and should not be legal.

Children have a right to live, and live without preventable acquired disability, which supersedes their parents' rights to act as proxies for medical decisions.

[LongtimeAZDem]

31. +∞

[littlemissmartypants]

35. Could not agree more, LongtimeAZDem. nt

[mr_lebowski]

53. +3

This may be extreme, but these parents should go to jail AFAIC ...

[suffragette]

28. "sutured at home"? That's more than what I would call a "scrape."

It’s unconscionable that his parents would expose him to this type of pain when there is readily available prevention for it.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

29. I bet they didn't have any local anesthetic for the pain of suturing.

Shut up, kid, what don't kill ya, makes ya stronger.

[suffragette]

30. I bet you're right.

[akraven]

32. I'm 64.

I had my tetanus shots before I was 5.

[littlemissmartypants]

34. I had to get a booster not long ago.

I could be wrong, but I think it's recommended every ten years.

[Sgent]

68. Correct

every 10 years, or every 5 years if you have potential exposure (step on rusty nail).

Also, if you are going to be around any infants, get the Tdap instead of Td, it includes a booster for pertussis which can help protect the infants.

[littlemissmartypants]

69. Thanks so much for the reply, Sgent.

I had forgotten about the pertussis component which adds to the importance of herd immunity.

I don't, we don't, get these shots because we want to take risks with our lives.

We take them to protect each other from harm.

It's inhumane to believe any other way, imo.

Thanks again.

[Hekate]

37. Among the non-fiction books I have on WWI nurses recounts the deaths of soldiers by tetanus...

The author knew exactly the source of transmission: "the well-manured fields of France" i.e. wounds contaminated by soil fertilized with the manure of cows and horses. The only treatment was morphine to ease the agony of the dying.

When cases started turning up in the wards, this nurse received the vaccination available in 1916-17, which put her in bed with a high fever and muscle aches for a week or two. She knew the risk and she knew the alternative, unlike the blissfully ignorant mommies of today, a century later.

My own vaccination booster in primary school (early 1950s) was nothing so drastic, but it did make my arm very stiff and sore for days. I must have whinged a lot, because I still remember the scolding my exasperated father finally gave me.

[mr_lebowski]

55. Only negative vaccination reaction I ever had, same as you, very sore arm

for about a week ... was from a typhoid fever shot I got (my first) in 8th grade I think it was ... we were going to the Philippine Islands ... or maybe it was Guam? One of those two that I had to have it for...

[Hekate]

60. Oh yeah, typhoid fever. We moved to Hawai'i before Statehood, and had to get those shots. Ouch.nt

[procon]

38. Betcha they vaccinated all the livestock on their farm.

Lose a cow to a preventable disease and it means real money is lost and they would suffer a substantial financial blow. If all their cash crop of piglets died off because they weren't vaccinated, the real cost would bankrupt them. A barn full of calves can die off within days if they caught some contagious disease that is routinely prevented by vacinations, an investment loss that few farms could survive.

So if they are safeguarding their financial investment in livestock, why aren't their own children as valuable as a pig?

[littlemissmartypants]

41. Sad, but telling point.

Wouldn't want the health department to shut down the farm. I wonder if you are right. My guess is childism*, the notion that children exist at the pleasure of the adults in charge.

*Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In this groundbreaking volume on the human rights of children, acclaimed analyst, political theorist, and biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues that prejudice exists against children as a group and that it is comparable to racism, sexism, and homophobia. This prejudice—“childism”—legitimates and rationalizes a broad continuum of acts that are not “in the best interests of children,” including the often violent extreme of child abuse and neglect. According to Young-Bruehl, reform is possible only if we acknowledge this prejudice in its basic forms and address the motives and cultural forces that drive it, rather than dwell on the various categories of abuse and punishment.

“There will always be individuals and societies that turn on their children," writes Young-Bruehl, “breaking the natural order Aristotle described two and a half millennia ago in his Nichomachean Ethics." In Childism, Young-Bruehl focuses especially on the ways in which Americans have departed from the child-supportive trends of the Great Society and of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Many years in the making, Childism draws upon a wide range of sources, from the literary and philosophical to the legal and psychoanalytic. Woven into this extraordinary volume are case studies that illuminate the profound importance of listening to the victims who have so much to tell us about the visible and invisible ways in which childism is expressed.

[EllieBC]

47. Bill the parents for the full amount. They put their child through hell

and almost killed the child over their stupid beliefs. Let them pay for it.

[juxtaposed]

51. put the parents in jail and have them pay the medical expenses for all involved

[Solly Mack]

52. How is that not child abuse? Child endangerment? Neglect?

I am so sick of the ignorance.

[littlemissmartypants]

59. Me too, Solly Mack. nt

[Me.]

56. He Was In EXCRUCIATING PAIN

Damn them

[Drahthaardogs]

67. His parents should pay.

Why should the taxpayers pay for this foolishness?

Make them pay us back!

[ck4829]

70. Kick

[backscatter712]

71. Fuck antivaxxers. Fucking ignant morons. Tetanus is a really nasty disease.

It's about as close as you can get to a real-live version of Joker Venom. Oh, you'll die with a smile on your face.

But those whole-body muscular spasms? Think of them as being like a full-body charley-horse! OW!