Measles seems to be the media’s latest health “crisis”.
According to the Tabor’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary in Mrs. Beatty’s nursing library, “measles” is:
A highly communicable disease caused by the rubeola virus marked by fever, general malaise, sneezing, nasal congestion, brassy cough, conjunctivitis, spots on the buccal mucosa, and a maculopapular eruption over the entire body …. An attack of measles almost always confers permanent immunity.
I got “an attack of measles” in childhood, as did every kid I know from the 1950s, before development of the measles vaccine. (According to Tabor’s, those kids who — beginning in the 1970s — got the measles vaccination also acquired lifetime immunity.)
Nearly all us boomer kids also got mumps, and chicken pox. At some point one of us would get a childhood illness, and within a week all the neighborhood kids were infected.
It was not unusual that when the first kid became symptomatic, the other moms sent their kids to play with the infected one, so all the kids would get it over with at once. Ours parents had grown up before most modern medicines were in common use, so they accepted that kids get sick — and in doing so acquire lifetime immunity.
This “getting it as a kid” was particularly important for the girls and measles, which can be devastating during pregnancy. During my medic training I attended a birthing by a woman who had never had measles as a child, but was exposed to the rubeola virus during her first trimester.
The baby was born alive, but lived only a about an hour. Seeing the catastrophic birth defects left an image that still haunts me a half century later. I’m neither ignorant, nor insensitive, to what measles can do.
It’s through the lens of those life experiences (and the COVID hysteria) that I view the media reporting of the “measles outbreak in Texas” and shake my head.
Some of the commentators appear to see this as an opportunity to revive the COVID-era panic… for whatever warped reason they want to relive that nonsense.
To hear some of the talking heads, you’d think measles is something new. I heard one say the measles outbreak is “potentially as fatal as the COVID-19 pandemic”. She clearly was not a “50ss kid” who would know better. But heaven forbid they listen to us boomers.
Pardon me while I wax nostalgic for a bygone era, but I’ve never met one of my age cohort who would trade growing up in the 50s for any subsequent decade. We were free to experience a lot of life on our own without parents planning “play dates” or constantly monitoring our lives. That included our experiencing some of the bad things that can happen.
Like when one of the girls in our group fell and broke her forearm with no adults around. Even though we were all kids, we knew enough to stabilize her arm, and walk her home — where her physician dad thanked us, complimented our crude first aid, and took it from there.
We managed that without any adults — or cell phones to call for help. She was back among us in a couple of days — with a cast on her arm that we wrote our names on.
Our parents lived through the Great Depression, and survived WWII, which taught them how to deal with adversity. Most of them passed that ability to adapt and cope on to us boomer kids — who are now the subject of ridicule from those today who apparently need counseling and a safe space if someone says something they don’t want to hear.
That’s probably why so many of us boomers were skeptical, and somewhat unfazed, by the media hype of the COVID pandemic, even though we were among the most vulnerable age group. Now we’re supposed to get concerned about measles?
Aside from the fact nearly all of us had measles as kids, and are now immune — even the nightmare of exposure during pregnancy is not really an issue for boomer women. So we can watch the media measles circus stress-free.
It isn’t hard to see where the media want to go with this hype. From some of their commentary they are trying to blame President Trump and HHS Secretary RFKJr. I’m not sure of the logic of that rationale.
The problem the health-scare media has by trying to politicize measles is not just the lack of concern of us boomers. It’s that trying to gin up measles hysteria will only work on those who learned nothing from the COVID foolishness. Which seems to be a diminishing segment of the population — at least based on the increasing number of people now boasting they never got the COVID jab.
I’m also discovering that those of us who really didn’t get the jab, and who survived hospitalization from COVID, are now seen by some as folk heroes of a sort.
Which is bizarre, considering how we were treated at the time. I wrote about it during our persecution in 2021:
I’ve been shown comments saying anyone not vaccinated deserves to get COVID. That unvaccinated people should be denied hospital COVID treatment to make room for vaccinated people who need it… Some even said the unvaccinated deserved to die from COVID…
And now some in the media want me to get all hot and bothered over measles? I believe the clinical term for my response to that is “Kiss my A..” !!
If, as a kid, you had measles or got the measles vaccine, this measles outbreak should not effect your health. Unless of course the crazies can somehow create enough panic to get some government bureaucrat to lock us down again and otherwise make our lives miserable.