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Who needs science anyway? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-16
This was entirely preventable — an unnecessary episode of torture for this poor child , Albert Wu, M.D., Johns Hopkins
In 2017, a six-year-old boy cut his forehead while playing on his family’s farm in Oregon. His parents stitched up the wound.
Six days later, he started crying, arching his neck, clenching his jaw, having severe muscle spasms throughout his body and gasping for breath. He was airlifted to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, the state’s premiere medical facility. There, doctors soon determined that he had contracted the readily preventable disease tetanus (AKA “lockjaw”), against which he had not received the standard vaccination regime available to all American children. His was Oregon’s first case of childhood tetanus in over 30 years.
He was immediately placed in the intensive care unit where he would breath with a ventilator for 44 days. He stayed in a darkened room with earplugs because noise, even talk above whisper level, increased his spasms. Soon, his blood pressure rose dangerously and he developed a high fever and a soaring heart rate. He was given a series of medications to control his blood pressure, muscle spasms and pain, along with the first of the tetanus vaccination shot series to help slow the progress of the disease.
Amazingly, he survived, with no immediately apparent disabling after-effects, and after 57 days was released from the hospital to a recovery home. The cost of his treatments was about $810,000, roughly the cost of vaccinating 6,230 children against tetanus. For privacy reasons it is undisclosed whether his family had medical insurance, or whether the state of Oregon picked up the tab.
Although the benefits of completing the tetanus vaccination series were later carefully explained to his parents — because simply having had the disease does not make one immune and it takes five vaccinations to confer immunization — they refused to have him vaccinated. Whether that was due to religious objections to vaccines or other reasons also remains undisclosed.
Tetanus bacteria are found everywhere in the environment, but notably in soil and manure and on farm implements, especially rusty ones where dirt can collect on rough surfaces. (Contrary to a popular misconception, rust does not cause tetanus.) This ambient tetanus remains in a dormant spore phase which can survive long periods of inactivity but is essentially harmless. However, when the spores enter the body of an animal, especially that of a mammal, through a cut or puncture wound they become active, causing a rapidly developing and often severe or fatal infection.
We know this because of verifiable observations and experiments made by many scientists. We also know how to prevent severe tetanus infections due to the cumulative work of patient, dedicated scientists.
One hundred and thirty-three years before the Oregon boy contracted tetanus, the two Italian scientists demonstrated that it is a bacterial infection. Five years later the famous Japanese scientist Shibasaburo Kitasoto isolated the bacteria and showed that it caused disease in rabbits. Eventually, it was shown that tetanus bacteria produce a neurotoxin, which explains its symptomatic muscle spasms.
Once the nature of tetanus infection was understood, an international team of scientists, led, in part, by the German scientist Emil von Behring worked toward developing an effective immunization. In 1924, the French Scientist Gaston Ramon used a weakened form of tetanus neurotoxin to stimulate our immune systems to form tetanus antibodies that immunized us against the disease. During World War II, the tetanus vaccine was used extensively to protect American soldiers, and in the 1950s it became part of a standard series of immunizations given to almost all American children, essentially eradicating the disease here.
Almost all children. But those whose parents raise them without the benefits of the rigorous scientific and medical research that produced today’s tetanus vaccines remain at risk of suffering the fate of the Oregon boy profiled above — or worse.
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