From the Past

In the kitchen, over the door, in my great-grandfather’s house, there used to be a faded old ‘Quarantine Sign’ placed there, no doubt, as a curiosity from years past. My memory says that it had something to do with a smallpox outbreak but I’m no longer sure. Next time I’m up at the Red House, I’ll try to remember to check it out.

I thought about that old sign when I read the news in last week’s paper that there is a whooping cough problem at the high school. It seems to me that years and years have gone by without much worry of serious contagious diseases at school. Then, suddenly, we’ve had the measles scare and now, right on home turf, whooping cough.

When I was a child, it was hoped that children would have all the ‘normal’ childhood diseases – measles, mumps, chicken pox – before they entered Kindergarten. Some of my friends have told me how their parents deliberately exposed them so that they could “get it over with” and my friend Memi wrote in her Oysterville memoir: It seems I was always sick at Christmas with one childhood disease or another. I suffered through whooping cough and pneumonia, along with the measles, mumps and chicken pox.

Some fifty years earlier, on November 22, 1896, my great-grandmother wrote in her usual Sunday letter to her older children: “…Cecil and Verona are having the whooping cough quite hard and are a great care to keep them from falling and hurting themselves when coughing. Will has never whooped and does not cough so hard…” The three children mentioned were the youngest of eight and, as far as I know, they didn’t attend school until they were in the upper grades. Instead, they ‘took their lessons’ at home with their mother who had been a school teacher before her marriage. Whether or not they were quarantined during their illness is unclear.

State by State, Community by Community

Somehow, as the years have passed, we have lulled ourselves into complacency about many diseases that were once considered a scourge. As soon as we found successful ways to immunize against them, they faded into the background of consciousness. Out of sight, out of mind, and “yes, of course,” we all tacitly agree, it’s a matter of individual conscience as to whether or not to give children the preventative vaccines.

I find myself conflicted on the entire issue. But mostly, I think if we are to live within a community, we must do whatever it takes to keep the community as a whole healthy and safe. It doesn’t seem fair for one person’s choice to put others at risk.  On the other hand… who exactly is at risk?  Is it just the other folks who have made the very same choice, themselves?   Or does it somehow adversely affect a much greater proportion of the community?  And how do adolescent children (or even unknowing adults) feel about being at risk from a choice their parents made on their behalf?

And speaking of communities, I was interested in the commentary attributed to our high school principal: With state tests and spring break coming up, the timing to make such a decision [to exclude non-vaccinated students] is not “perfect,” Tobin said. However, it could have been worse: exposure to pertussis could have happened in the middle of the major testing push.

So there you have it folks! It seems that testing is indeed recognized as the most important aspect of school attendance. And here I thought it was education… Which I also thought was one of those institutions conceived for the greater good. Obviously, I have more pondering to do.