‘No concept of how awful it was’: the forgotten world of pre-vaccine childhood in Australia
“In the 19th century, the leading cause of death in children was infectious disease. People would have 10 children and might lose five of them. We lived with high rates of infant mortality,” she says.
As well as two world wars, Australians in the first half of the 20th century had a Spanish flu pandemic and a bubonic plague outbreak to contend with, along with numerous spot-fires of disease.
To modern parents, disease names like polio and smallpox and diphtheria have been relegated by vaccination to arcane words with no practical relevance. But while these cruel diseases no longer kill Australian children, experts say there may be a risk of lapsing into complacency.
“The visibility of the ravages of polio, and the fact that most people knew someone who’d had a child die were really powerful drivers, people were desperate for vaccines,” says David Isaacs, clinical professor in paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Sydney, and author of Defeating the Ministers of Death – The Compelling History of Vaccination. “Many younger people have no concept now of how awful it was.”
“It was a reality of life in Australia. A lot of people don’t realise how many diseases were rampant until relatively recently. There’s a reduced visibility of the consequences of these diseases, people don’t appreciate the fear parents felt of sending a child to school and possibly having them not come back into the family,” he says.
“Thankfully we are not seeing new cases of polio, but there are still people living with the consequences of the disease, and they feel forgotten.”
Not that there weren’t triumphs, notably the eradication of smallpox, which Isaacs says killed up to one in three babies in the London of the 18th and early 19th centuries. A campaign by the World Health Organization, starting in 1967, saw it wiped out by 1980.
The first smallpox vaccinations in Australia were given in the early 1800s. That was no good to the people of the Eora nation. In 1789, a disease believed to be smallpox was introduced by the colonists. It tore through the Aboriginal population of Sydney, killing up to 70%.
While smallpox is no longer a threat, MacIntyre warns that diseases we have almost forgotten can easily return if vaccination rates slip.
“One example is the fall of the Soviet Union,” she says. “There were good vaccination programs, and then when the Soviet Union fell, many stopped being conducted.”
As a result, cases of diphtheria, which had been almost unheard of due to vaccination, reached 140,000, and the disease killed 4,000 children and young adults.
“If we stopped vaccinating against diphtheria here, we would see the same,” MacIntyre says
As for committed anti-vaxxers, Tom Keneally knows what he would like to do to try to shift their perspective.
“I’d like to take anti-vaxxers back in time to my childhood. There would be a story on every street which could change their minds.”
