One of the attendings today was opining about how flippant parents have gotten with vaccines now that most of the diseases that vaccines prevent are rarely if ever seen anymore. However, she has been practicing so long that she can pull stories from her own experience of most of the diseases. She's seen many kids die of the various types of meningitis that are basically nonexistent in the US. She's seen measles, mumps, rubella. Rotavirus used to be everywhere. The list goes on and on. However, she does admit that there are a few diseases that were gone even before her time. Polio is the first, but thanks to FDR and the countless other survivors, everyone still remembers the horrors of that disease.
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| The statue of Balto in Central Park, NYC |
Diptheria is the second. But, unlike polio, people don't remember this nasty respiratory illness. So the example she used is actually the story of Balto, the Iditarod husky. The story was popularized (and heavily fictionalized) during my childhood by the animated movie named after the real dog.
The real tale is of the famous passage of a series of dog sled teams along the harrowing Iditarod trail to deliver diphtheria serum to Nome, Alaska during an major outbreak of the disease with a blizzard blocking any other transport by air, train, or sea. Diphtheria toxin consists of antibodies against the bacterium, and was the only treatment at the time.
Nowadays no one training in medicine in the US has even seen a case of diphtheria thanks to vaccination. There were 5 reported cases in the US in the past 10 years (compared to over 1700 cases of the measles and well over 100,000,000 cases of the flu).
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