Carrol Vertrees: Vaccines deliver medical ingenuity

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Carrol Vertrees

Updated: January 23, 2012 4:12AM

I cannot leap even a low building in a single bound, but I feel super anyway after getting my flu shot.

Old folks, of which I am one, should get those shots. Younger ones, too, but they should not be forced to do it. Some people object to the shots, especially if getting them is mandatory, a hard rule to enforce.

The best protection is to stay away from people who have the flu, or are getting it. Right?

This reminds me of an item in Reader’s Digest. A sailor had a sore throat, cough, body aches, sneezes — a list of stuff. At the ship’s infirmary, a corpsman said there was a virus going around, “ ... and you probably caught it from a shipmate. But don’t worry. It’s not contagious.”

When I was a kid — Hoover was still president — a smallpox scare swept through the area and Doc Porter was busy vaccinating kids against this very mean disease. My mother had smallpox as a child and she was very sensitive about it.

We kids did not have a choice. The procedure was painful and crude — the only way doctors knew how to get it done. The doc rubbed a place on the upper arm until it was raw and bleeding — that’s how I remember it. Then he injected something and wished us good luck.

Sometimes the spot got infected and became very ugly. It healed slowly. As I recall, I ranked at the top in my first-grade room in the disgusting scab derby. I was the best reader, too, and those two skills surely have helped me understand the meaning of life.

These several days of pain and discomfort protected kids from smallpox, and nobody yelled that we had civil rights. If our moms said get vaccinated, we did it.

Mandating good health habits is a process born of good intentions, but with no way to be measured. We see signs in food store restrooms saying “Employes must wash their hands after using the facilities.” How many do? Who knows? In fast-food stops along the highways, travelers rush in and out without going near wash basins.

Do people have to be told to wash their hands?

My generation has been touched by some wonderful medical advances. I lost some school kid friends to scarlet fever — many others did, too. That disease was a scourge until ways to combat it were discovered.

We all remember how polio ravaged the country until doctors Sabin and Salk gave us vaccines that could prevent this scary, deadly enemy. The whole country rushed to get protection from this crippler.

Younger people may not even remember whooping cough, but it, too, was a threat to the lives of children. Discovering ways to protect us from such enemies is part of our proud medical discovery history.

Generations ago, flu killed millions — it was a public enemy. Developing shots to stave off the effects of flu is another example of medical ingenuity.

Getting flu shots still is voluntary, but the good news is that they are available. We are blessed.

We don’t have to get the shots, but when we abstain, we should avoid quoting the immortal words of that ship corpsman who said, “Don’t worry, it isn’t contagious.”