Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My Aunt Goldie would have been 93 years old this year. Would is the operative word; she passed in 1936 at age three, when my dad was just five years old. She died of diphtheria, a disease that once ravaged children around the world. There was a cure involving diphtheria antitoxin derived from injecting horses with the disease, then harvesting the antitoxin these immune animals produced, but it was expensive.
My grandparents, Forrest Evertt and Sally Tucker were sharecroppers, working on a small cotton farm in eastern Arkansas. Grandpa had his own farm but lost it when the stock market crashed in 1929, and the bank called his note.
They were double victims of a nation gone mad with greed. We see that same government in action today, almost a century later, as the pendulum of insanity swings far to the right.
By the 1940s, the DPT vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus) was given to every school child in America. The death rates from these three dreaded childhood diseases dropped to near zero. Pertussis, if you didn’t recognize the scientific name, is commonly called whooping cough.
In 1929, my late father-in-law Sigmund Gustaf Theodore Hahn, (Pete to family and friends) suffered another scourge of children of the era. He was infected with polio. For the rest of his life, he wore a brace and walked with a pronounced limp on his withered leg.
Thankfully, it didn’t affect his lungs, or he would have spent those years in an iron lung.
Iron lungs will soon grow more common as the chief of our national health, Robert Kennedy Jr., continues his virulent anti-vaccination campaign.
Kennedy’s ignorance is the greatest danger to American children after murder by handguns.
It doesn’t border on the ludicrous; it is ludicrous as Kennedy’s role as Secretary of Health and Human Services devolves into quackery. The children of the United States deserve better. Contrary to the nationalistic zealots, we don’t have the “best of everything.” Our health care is near the bottom of advanced nations, as is our standard of living. We do lead in percentage of citizens in prison and in military spending, but that’s about it.
Diphtheria kills when it blocks the airway with an infectious mucous plug. In the old west, they treated it barbarically by forcing the stem off a rose bush or a closely trimmed pine branch down the victims’ throat, tearing out the blockage. Patients enduring this treatment sometimes drowned in their own blood, but many were able to breathe and eventually overcame the disease.
In short order, we’ll be back to those methods if Kennedy’s policies stay in place after the next couple of elections.
You hear many people whine about “overregulation.” What you don’t hear is the effect that follows deregulation.
Your water would be polluted, the air would be similar to Los Angeles on its worst day nationwide, and Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier National Parks would be clear-cut wastelands.
The community-wide treatment before vaccines were commonplace in the 1950s was quarantine and isolation.
Swimming pools were closed all summer if even the hint of a polio case was heard about within 100 miles. Families with measles, mumps, diphtheria, tuberculosis, or any of dozens of other infectious diseases were quarantined by the local public health office.
Imagine the reaction today. We all witnessed the attempt to get people to wear masks during COVID when no one was sure what we were up against. It failed with a substantial portion of politically motivated citizens.
That isn’t the case in Japan, China, or Western Europe, where people routinely wear masks if they have a cold or have been exposed to a contagion. I guess we lead the world in “independent” thought as well.
There was a cure for my aunt that I never met back in 1936, but it cost more than my grandparents could afford, and their only daughter died as a result.
Her death came as much from economic policies as it did from the infectious disease.
As a nation, America was sick, economically sick, with widespread margin buying on the New York Stock Exchange. Margin buying meant paying only 10% for a stock, then selling it at full price and paying off the margin, the other 90% you borrowed originally. This paid well if the stock was on the rise, but when it fell, the investor was left holding the bag.
If only a few people indulged in this sketchy practice, the market could survive dips. When everyone did it, the market collapsed.
With it, the banks that invested in margin buying failed as well. There was no FDIC or FSLIC in the 1920s; those were “liberal” ideas put in place by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. All your accounts were at risk; there was no national insurance.
As the banks closed, they paid off their largest contributors first, leaving small investors holding the bag. That is the trend in the United States: rugged individualism for the little guy and corporate bailouts for the wealthy.
We still live under those conditions. You can go bankrupt and become homeless if you get sick in the USA, but if Microsoft, GMC, Boeing, or any of dozens of investment firms make a bad decision and begin to lose profitability, the feds are there to hand out the cash to keep them afloat.
As they say, follow the money. Healthcare is the prime example.
Medical technology has increased immeasurably since my father’s little family mourned the passing of their daughter and sister in a little row house on some land near the L ‘Anguille River, a couple of dozen miles west of where it flows into the Mississippi. It’s been 90 years since that horrible day.
My grandparents never talked about it. My father only mentioned it in passing a couple of times. For just a couple of dollars, they could have saved her. But a couple of dollars in the Great Depression might as well have been millions.
We live in a country devoid of health safety nets for the average person. If you’re lucky enough to have medical insurance through your job, you are blessed. If you have to pay for insurance, that’s an entirely different story.
Many people just go without, and when disaster strikes, depend on “GoFundMe” or the donations of strangers to stay off the streets and avoid sleeping under bridges.
With the return of measles, can other infectious disease outbreaks be far behind?
The Internet was purported to be a source of information that helped society as a whole advance. It’s turned out to be a Balkanized bastion for crackpots to gather together and endanger the rest of us.
Iron lungs, suffering infants, and people destroyed by economic fate.
Why?