Unnecessary risks

Summer for my generation was the time for mass circumcision by the neighborhood barber, with mashed guava leaves applied on the fresh cut to promote healing.

Summertime was also ideal for contracting illnesses that normally do not strike twice in a lifetime. Although there are rare repeat cases, health experts agree that you are immunized for life once you have contracted chickenpox, measles and mumps.

So when school was out and a child in the family developed one of those three illnesses, other kids were brought to the patient so everyone would be infected, get sick for a week or two and then immunized.

I had two of the infections: measles and mumps. I was told that the surefire folk cure for measles or tigdas was kolantro – coriander seeds that were boiled, with the resulting yellowish infusion banishing the measles pronto. But my mother simply gave me sponge baths to bring down the fever from measles, and the red splotches eventually disappeared. 

For mumps or beke, the traditional treatment was blue dye mixed with vinegar, stirred into a paste and applied on my bloated cheeks and jaw. The blue dye was readily available in the neighborhood sari-sari or convenience store because it was used to make white clothing cleaner during laundry.

Kids who got chickenpox simply waited for it to go away. It was like vaccination, but risky. Health officials have warned that chickenpox can be severe and even fatal for people with weakened immune systems. A four-year-old girl with leukemia died of chickenpox in 2012, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccination is still the safer alternative.

Back in the day, however, the only vaccines my generation received were against chickenpox and polio. I received a shot in school against chickenpox, and I was glad I didn’t get the disgusting bulutong spots and blisters that I was told were extremely itchy.

The polio vaccine was administered orally in my Catholic school through sugar cubes. And the vaccination coverage was not universal. Two of our senior editors did not receive the vaccine and contracted the poliovirus. I believe it not only left them physically impaired for life but also weakened their immune system, which might have played a factor in their early deaths – one at age 48, back in 2006, and the other three years ago at age 53.

So the current aversion to any vaccine, including those that have been thoroughly tested, is a seriously worrisome public health concern.

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We all know what is causing people to shun all government vaccination programs these days. The hysteria generated by the Dengvaxia scare is making alternative medicine and traditional practices attractive again to people especially in rural areas.

Since the lifetime immunization through infection has worked for me (so far), I can’t effectively dissuade people from reverting to the old ways of inoculating oneself from chickenpox, measles and mumps instead of receiving vaccines.

But the system doesn’t work for polio and other potentially fatal or debilitating diseases for which vaccines, with varying degrees of efficacy, are available. Apart from polio, vaccines can be administered for meningitis, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, cholera, yellow fever, diphtheria, seasonal influenza, human papillomavirus, typhoid, tuberculosis, shingles and a few other afflictions.

Children are particularly vulnerable to many of those illnesses, and several of the vaccines are best administered during early childhood and teenage years.

Any parent who has seen a polio patient would not want his or her child to contract the ailment that can cause paralysis of certain parts of the body. I haven’t heard of a foolproof folk herbal treatment for poliomyelitis, although licorice root, fennel seeds and ginger have been mentioned. But licorice root and fennel seeds are available only in a few gourmet shops in this country. And I have yet to hear reliable testimony about the anti-polio properties of ginger and turmeric.

Our scientists, however, say there is some basis for Pinoys’ belief in the efficacy of the folk remedy for dengue, the weed called tawa-tawa.

Even without the shrill hyperventilation and grave-digging of the chief public attorney, it looks like there is solid basis for concern about the little known side effects of Dengvaxia, Sanofi Pasteur’s controversial anti-dengue vaccine that is now doomed in this country.

So Pinoys are just going back to the old ways of dealing with the potentially deadly affliction, and more people are willing to try out tawa-tawa. Some people I know who grew up in the rural areas swear that the common weed works against dengue.

Other ailments, however, are best prevented through tried and tested vaccines. Millions of people, particularly children, have been saved from death and disability worldwide by vaccines. Chickenpox, if contracted in adulthood for the first time by those who didn’t get vaccinated, can be particularly painful and lead to permanent scarring.

It would be a tragedy if millions of Filipinos would be exposed to unnecessary risks because of the hysteria over Dengvaxia.