"Our Darling" Inez Pearl Daniel
My great-grandparents--Alonzo and Evie Daniel--buried three children who might have lived if vaccines and antibiotics had been available. My grandpa's baby sister Inez died during one of the epidemics raging through Tennessee that year (influenza, measles, malaria).
Most healthy kids today might survive these diseases without vaccines, but why risk extremely high temperatures, encephalitis, and pneumonia? Or spread a potentially deadly virus to others with compromised immune systems?
"We Will Meet Again" Anita Ann Daniel
According to the United States Mortality Statistics of 1926, rural Tennessee recorded the following deaths among white men, women, and children:
Five-year-old Anita Ann Daniel was one of them.
- 362 deaths......Typhoid and Paratyphoid fever
- 86 deaths........Malaria
- 3 deaths..........Smallpox
- 218 deaths......Measles
- 24 deaths........Scarlet Fever
- 226 deaths......Whooping Cough
- 205 deaths......Diphtheria
- 1090 deaths....Influenza
- 26 deaths........Erysipelas (bacterial skin infection usually caused by Streptococcus pyogenes)
- 15 deaths........Meningococcus meningitis
- 1658 deaths....Tuberculosis (respiratory)
- 48 deaths........Tuberculosis (Meninges)
- 150 deaths......Tuberculosis (Other)
- 742 deaths......Cancer
- 60 deaths........Rheumatism
Penicillin and antibiotics might have saved Bobbie, my grandpa's 12-year-old brother, who suffered from a series of kidney infections and "bad tonsils."
What about autism and vaccines? My 39-year-old daughter has mild autism, which wasn't diagnosed until she was an adult. When she was a child, psychologists diagnosed only the most severe forms of autism. Nevertheless, I suspected autism and despite what special ed teachers and school psychologists surmised, I did not think she would "grow out" of the social awkwardness and learning disabilities.
Thirty-five years ago, I listened to rumors about vaccines and autism and wondered if all of those childhood vaccines may have contributed to her delays. But I was hesitant to embrace those rumors: My little girl had shown signs as an infant--long before her series of vaccines. I observed other children in our family, neighborhood, and classrooms who were required to have childhood vaccines to enter the public school system. I thought they all seemed "normal." As science debunked the theories of vaccine-induced autism, I dismissed those theories and continued immunizing my children.
From my own experience raising an undiagnosed autistic child in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I am convinced the rise in autism is due to an increase in diagnoses over the past twenty years.
A shorter version of this essay appears in the Elders Speaking group blog.
All photos taken at Cedar Valley Cemetery (TN) by CD Burr
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