Bring out the newsreels of children in iron lungs

I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemics of the 1940s and '50s. In fact, my mother, now in her mid-90s, survived the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed 18 million children and young adults worldwide. That's a lot of bodies from a killer we can't see.

The polio outbreaks of the '40s and '50s usually occurred during the warm months of summer. Children were confined to homes and back yards and warned to "stay away" from their neighborhood friends. Public swimming pools were considered the most dangerous places of all.

I lived in a small, rural town, much like the environs that surround Santa Rosa. You knew all the kids. I recall one little girl who lived down the block in a foster home. Her name was Cindy. The ambulance took her away in the middle of the afternoon. Later, we heard she was dead. Bobby, my best pal, caught it. We didn't see him for three months. He survived without ill effects, but to this day he hates to visit hospitals.

Billy, another friend, was confined to a wheelchair with one withered arm and two useless legs. He survived into his mid-40s, but, eventually suffocated in his sleep.

Newsreels, which were shown before movies, would often show dozens of children who had contracted polio. They were in hospital wards confined to iron lungs -- large metal cylinders with motors and compressors lined up like cars in a parking lot with benevolent nurses standing by. Only the children's heads protruded from these contraptions.

Later, an usher would pass a cardboard can. People would contribute dimes, but when we left the theater and I asked: "Mom, what will happen to those kids?" She kept walking and commanded, "Put your jacket on."

Recently, in a newsletter to his faculty, Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, offered his thoughts on "when personal choice incurs community costs and risks."

Smoking was one example, but Pizzo went on to state: "It is a sad testament that recent years have witnessed an increasing number of parents opting out of the immunizing their children." What Pizzo was essentially driving home was that health care choice has come to be viewed as a "personal right," but he went on to ask, when "does personal choice conflict with the health of children and communities?"

Parents who do not immunize their children are living in a haughty fantasy. Their children live in immune bubbles thanks to more responsible parents who immunize their kids. The children of those puffed up on the cutting edge of alternative, pseudo-science gleaned from nut sites on the Internet or public radio, need to reassess. Meningitis, the polio virus, whopping cough, mumps, measles and all those unseen things that can cripple or kill a kid are still out there and hungry for little hosts. As the population of unimmunized children grows, they live at greater risk from one another and to society at large.

If I lived next door to people who didn't immunize their children, and they knew I had a meth lab in the tool shed; or they saw me setting up a shooting range; or I was constructing a back yard nuclear reactor for alternative energy, they would instantly, and rightfully, call the cops to protect their children.

So, what should we do with parents who do not vaccinate their children? One, dig up old newsreels of polio epidemics and ask them to observe the children in braces, wheelchairs and iron lungs. Two, allow them to reconsider their ill-advised decision, and, three, failing compliance, arrest them for child endangerment. Make their children wards of the courts, and vaccinate them. What's more important: embracing bad science or the lives of children?

Michael Koepf is a resident of Elk.