For my summer reading, I’ve been making my way through David McCulloch’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.
The book, first published in 1977, chronicles the often amazing ineptitude that accompanied first the French, then the American, efforts to build the canal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cost of that folly, in both lives and money, was staggering.
What’s interesting is how certain ideas became so rooted in the minds of those leading the projects that they ignored perfectly good advice, based on sound science, because it clashed with what they fervently believed.
Doesn’t that sound familiar.
An example. Diseases like malaria and yellow fever were long and firmly believed to infect people by the breathing in of, respectively, foul swamp vapours or the stench of man-made sewage in fever zones. Many so-called experts also asserted personal moral decadence made one more susceptible.
But by the early years of the U.S. effort, science had proved those deadly diseases were carried by certain subspecies of mosquitoes. There’d even been a successful campaign to rid Havana of yellow fever by eliminating the mosquitoes’ favoured breeding locations — water pooled near where people lived.
Despite that, however, for far too long those in charge of the canal project — convinced they knew better — continued to dismiss their own medical officers’ “wild” ideas about mosquitoes along with their pleas for resources to tackle the insect threat.
As a result, many more workers died than otherwise would have.
It’s not hard to understand why many people thought breathing in foul vapours in the tropics could cause yellow fever or malaria. After seeing some of those who worked or lived in such conditions suddenly stricken with disease, often after recently having arrived in Panama perfectly healthy, observers attributed a cause and effect relationship when none actually existed.
Meanwhile, many of the newcomers to the canal project zone had no doubt been bitten by mosquitoes many times before, back where they came from, without ill effect. So the idea that mosquitoes here were somehow different wasn’t obvious.
But when science incontrovertibly showed that the stinging insects were behind deadly outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever, many simply refused to accept that they were wrong.
That parallel struck me as I was reading this summer’s report on safety of vaccines used for routine immunization in the U.S. that had been prepared for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Among other findings, the research once again conclusively confirmed that no credible study has established any link between autism and MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccinations given to children. It’s frankly a waste that so much effort has had to go into disproving the false autism-vaccines connection.
In spite of the latest research, I have no doubt that many in the anti-vaxxer crowd who believe vaccinations cause autism will continue to simply refuse to accept that they are wrong.
Child is fine. Child gets vaccinated. Child reacts badly and is later diagnosed with autism. For anti-vaxxers, the apparent cause and effect relationship they believe they’ve witnessed trumps any and all scientific evidence to the contrary.
The damage done by the anti-vaxxers has been considerable. Due to small but significant numbers of misguided parents passing on immunizing their children — often due to the scaremongering of people like celebrity Jenny McCarthy — cases of childhood diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough have been on the rise in the U.S., the U.K. and some areas in Canada.
You’ll never convince the diehard anti-vaxxers, but it’s important that new parents get fact-based accounts on the benefits of childhood vaccinations. An interesting new study out of Alberta found that new parents who refused to allow Vitamin K injections for their babies soon after birth — an established and safe protocol to prevent rare but serious bleeding due to its deficiency — were 15 times more likely to also later skip standard childhood vaccinations. That’s an early clue to help doctors identify parents who might benefit from more information.
The actual causes of autism are slowly being found. Perhaps someday they’ll be fully accepted.