There is currently a measles outbreak, mostly among people about 80 miles east of me. I wonder about being revaccinated. If I liked my new doctor better, I would go in and have my titer tested to find out if I am protected. I probably should do that anyway. Despite having had both kinds of measles as a child, serious cases, and more recent vaccination as an adult, it is possible that I have no immunity.

Immune systems do not respond identically to vaccines and some fail to respond to some vaccines. By vaccinating everyone the so-called “herd immunity” offers protection to those too young (under 1 year) or otherwise unprotected.

The immune system responds to disease, but a vaccination gives it an essential nudge in advance—the vaccine tells the immune system: here is a disease, recognize it as dangerous and prepare now to fight it off.

Sometimes this alert lasts in the body for a lifetime, but sometimes only temporarily. Sometimes the immune system forgets. This is not the fault of the vaccine, but simple variation in ourselves. Sometimes the body fails to retain protection against a disease despite vaccination or previous illness. Titer falls to zero over time. 

That happened to me with measles. I had very bad cases as a child, but by my 20s my immune system had “forgotten” and lost all antibodies to fight the disease. I was asked if I had had measles as a child the first time I was pregnant. I remembered being sick, but I called my mother to confirm. “Oh, yes, you were terribly sick for a long time.” I told my doctor I was certain I’d had measles. As a result, my immunity was not tested. My doctor and I assumed that my childhood illness meant I was safe from the disease, and we were wrong.

When my blood was later tasted despite my assurance, I was pregnant with my second child. I had no protection from measles at all! I did not know this until it was too late to do anything preventative. It meant that I could have contracted the disease while I was pregnant, and it also meant that my baby Ian had no immunity inherited from me during his crucial first year until he could be vaccinated.

We were lucky not to be exposed, but then I was careful and we lived in an area where nearly all people do vaccinate.

Of the dozens of new cases of measles in the Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR area, only one was an vaccinated person. The remaining cases are all unvaccinated people.

Too many people are now making decisions about vaccinations without any understanding of the dangers of these diseases. Everyone of my generation and before knew of someone crippled or dead from polio, perhaps a cousin blinded by measles, an uncle people whispered was sterile from mumps. I experienced most of these diseases. I knew a girl who had missed her polio immunization and had survived, but had 17 surgeries by her late teens, merely to allow her to walk with braces and canes. My husband had a school friend.

I had a severe case at age 7—almost lost my vision. My younger sister was able to get the new vax and was spared. During the same “epidemic” our neighbor’s grandson was born deaf from complications of a different strain. The anti-vaxxers need to understand all of this. Just because MTV or your yoga teacher ‘feels’ it might cause autism is not really an adequate health plan.—Nina Gaby, on my Facebook page (posted here with permission)

Vaccines work.

Some understanding of “vaccination” dates back hundreds of years. We have known for a very long time, for example, that exposure to cow pox might make a child sick, but that illness offered protection from smallpox. And smallpox would kill them in agony. People chose a short illness over death.

Some generally less lethal diseases are trickier still. Influenza, for example, is always around and it mutates so that every season there is a new version, or an old version returned. Vaccines must be developed well in advance of “flu season” based on the best guess of what the disease will be like when it arrives. Sometimes the guesswork is spot on, sometimes it misses. The vaccine may protect me against the flu by accurately stirring my immune system to create the antibodies to prevent disease or merely shove them in a likely direction. At worst, the vaccine reminds my body to prepare and I likely have a milder case than I would otherwise.

I recall being told that, yes, we do develop antibodies to protect us from colds and flu. These antibodies may even stick around (the body remembers), but there are so very many variations and mutations of these pathogens that immunity to one does not protect a person much or at all from the next. The first year I taught grades 6-12, I suffered from 17 separate colds, each lasting a very short time. The next year I had none.

These days, if I fail to have a flu vaccine, I not only catch the flu but also develop a complication such as pneumonia. In 2014 I missed my flu shot and I was sick literally for months over the following school year. The flu shot sometimes gives me a sore arm for a day or so, and it has meant that I have regularly been exposed to flu in the past five years without contracting the disease. For me a vaccination means that even if the influenza vaccine is not very effective and I got the flu, I would not get as sick as I would have without it. It also means I do not develop complications.

That means I get my shots.