Reply #50: That was pretty much my baby sister's first year of life. Our brother & I brought stuff home...

[Hekate]

... from elementary school and the poor thing caught it all from us. We all had the DPT vaccinations so at least we couldn't catch whooping cough or diphtheria, but our little sister's health was severely compromised for many years afterward.

Our Mom had personal experience with whooping cough: her own baby brother almost died from it.

When the polio vaccine went public our parents took us all to the elementary school for the shots. Half the town must have been there; the other half was probably at a clinic at another school. Dangers from polio vaccine? Ha! Polio itself was a killer and a crippler and every parent knew it.

One summer in high school I was a Candy Striper at the hospital and took the jitney into the city with miscellaneous others. One was a girl about my age, blind, wearing heavy braces on her legs--turned out to be the sister of someone I knew in school. As we chatted she volunteered the information that her condition was from complications of having mumps: mumps encephalitis.

In college I met a young man from the Afghanistan who was indelibly and terribly scarred by smallpox.

Does my family believe in vaccinations? Is the Pope German?

Hekate