5 Extinct Diseases Coming Soon to a Daycare Near You
I wouldn’t say that the rise of vaccine skepticism coming alongside the explosion, often among the same crowd, of “brain boosters” and other spurious morning powders, astounds me. I’ve been on this earth long enough to realize that hypocrisy isn’t only rampant, but a genuine defense mechanism for a brain that cannot or will not process two sets of information at the same time.
A whole subset of people, against centuries of knowledge and study, have maybe watched too many X-Men movies and assumed that any syringe being inserted into a patient secretly contains some unstable, untested serum. I’m not sure you could even get a simple IV drip into some of these kids in case of dehydration without a weeping mother convinced that saline solution is going to turn their child into a monster.
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Funny enough, some of the diseases that we’d considered done and dusted thanks to vaccines? They’re the ones most likely to leave your kids scarred and deformed the way the flu shot does in their strange minds. Here are five diseases primed for a comeback, thanks to our completely unwarned immune systems.
Measles
As we speak, Texas is in the midst of a measles outbreak. Measles has always had one large hurdle to overcome in modern awareness, which is that the name, I will admit, sounds pretty funny. It’s like the nickname of someone’s weird little brother who tags along with you to the quarry before getting lost for a week. I think part of the reason that it became a funny disease is that it wasn’t currently threatening the livelihood of children for a good while, so people didn’t necessarily learn that the disease itself is a lot less cute.
It’s a highly infectious disease that affects mostly children and has a not-insignificant mortality rate, something that would usually rocket it to the top of the list. I feel like “measles can be fatal” is a sentence even I would have had to check until recently. Of course, the ignorance was allowed, since measles has been considered officially “eliminated” in the U.S. since 2000. Now that we’re at risk of losing that status, you might want to check up on what happens outside of your kid turning a bit red.
Mumps
If you found the word “measles” funny, there’s little to no hope to get you to take “mumps” seriously. I’m not sure exactly who was in charge of naming diseases back then, but I personally would have steered clear of the “possible names of theme park mascots” vibe they settled on. Mumps, to its credit, does have less of a chance of killing you than measles does, but it will be a thoroughly unpleasant time for you and anyone dealing with you during your ordeal.
The hint that it might, in fact, be mumps? It’s when your face, specifically your salivary glands, starts painfully swelling up to the point where it looks like you just got your wisdom teeth taken out with needle-nose pliers. You’ll be lucky if it’s only your face that balloons up, though. Testicles and ovaries can also decide to start upsizing without your permission, and in particularly unlucky cases, it can cause swelling in the brain or spinal cord.
None of this, as you might guess, feels good.
Rubella
The first three diseases on this list have one very important thing in common: They’re all bundled up in one easy vaccine, known as the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine. This vaccine, at one point, to people who don’t get scientific information from people wearing tight T-shirts and two-pound watches, was a godsend. A pinprick on your child’s arm, a Howdy Doody band-aid and three nasty diseases were off the list forever? That’s a beautiful combination of safety and convenience.
Unluckily for all of us except reactionary podcasters with the skull content of a dried calabash, some fuck-ups in 1998 botched a study that showed ties between the MMR vaccine and autism. Scientific errors have been identified in that study, it was retracted by the journal that published it and fully abandoned scientifically in 2010, and similar studies all over the world have never been able to reproduce those results.
But… what if those first scientists were onto something? Something special and magical only they could see? I like their gumption, and as such, I’m going to risk my baby becoming pink and feverish.
Polio
We are drawing precipitously close to the modern U.S. having a reference point for polio that isn’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol. In 2022, a person in New York developed a case of paralytic polio (yes, that’s the really bad kind) after the disease had been considered eradicated in the U.S.. To no one’s shock, this didn’t prompt doubters to sprint to the nearest clinic to get their shots in order.
As little as I’m surprised by any of this, polio certainly comes the closest, given the absolute horror show of a disease it is. Even if you manage to survive it, you can be left paralyzed, with twisted limbs, living a much more unpleasant life than if you’d stayed at the pediatrician for another 20 minutes. Vaccines don’t cause autism. There’s no basis in fact to make that claim. But even if you really believe it, and you’re weighing possible autism versus possible polio? I’m personally picking autism.
Whooping Cough
I swear, I think medicine started legitimately moving faster because we starting giving diseases names that were harder to make fun of. Whooping cough, or pertussis, is mostly accurate to its vivid name. However, the actual symptoms go much further. For example, you can rocket off enough of those loud, hilarious whooping coughs that you break your own ribs or give yourself a hernia.
When whooping cough can actually present with no cough at all is also the most dangerous situation — in infants. They don’t make any Looney Tunes sound effects, they just start turning purple, red or blue and may stop breathing. Suddenly, you’ve got a bright red, puffy baby who ironically, looks a lot like Joe Rogan, who got you into this mess in the first place.
Good luck with the doctors then. Maybe a chiropractor can fix it.
