“It’s mostly when they start to get better, or in sad cases after they die, that you sit back and you decompress and you say, wow, that was tragic, that could have been prevented.” —Allison Messina, M.D.
during the 2015 Disneyland measles outbreak when he decided to transition his Northridge, California, clinic to one that only served vaccinated patients.
One adult patient’s death from tetanus during his residency left a particularly deep impression. Tetanus is a serious disease caused by bacteria in the environment but it can be protected by a vaccine the CDC recommends for babies, children, preteens, teenagers, and adults. “Even as a doctor in training, it was one of the most terrible things to see…I will never forget it,” he says. “They died in front of me—in the emergency room by the way, they never made it past there.
“It’s really, really hard, because my patients come into the hospital to get chemotherapy, and then the hospital’s full of all these really sick kids that have the flu,” Dr. Allen-Rhoades says. “It can pass through the hospital despite our best infection control methods.
The potential impact of growing rates of vaccine hesitancy extends beyond individual patients and even entire waiting rooms or hospitals. As a pediatric infectious disease specialist,M.D., M.P.H., F.A.A.P., witnesses preventable diseases firsthand when treating patients at Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, and she also sees the large-scale impact through her role as director of the Division of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention for Alameda County, California.
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