I believe the risk in being around non vaccinated people is the potential they may be sick. Whooping cough and all the other inoculations and vaccinations may carry over after you start immunosuppressant drugs. If my understanding is correct, immunosuppressant drugs kill off the phages or white blood cells that can adapt to killing off a perceived threat. In this case foreign tissue that is your new lungs. A certain amount of white blood cells are still being made post transplant. How much and how long they last is an important question to understanding the quality of your new immunity level.
We use inoculants to trick our bodies into building chemical antibodies against particular viruses. Vaccinations achieve essentially the same thing including certain bacterial pathogens. Anybody who stood in line for a sugar cube polio vaccination also carried a small pox inoculation scar on an arm. The antibodies are chemicals that keep our phages on high alert for something like the small pox virus. In short, the antibodies built up from your immunizations remain. And the white blood cells that remain once you are on immunosuppressant drugs, will be adapting to those antibodies.
Yeah, the variability in immunizations is frightening for the general population, not to mention a person on immunosuppressant drugs. This isn’t just children. Parents in the seventies were being fashionable and dabbling in some but not all infant and childhood immunizations. This means you need to be watching a pretty large population, figuring age 36 and younger.
Health laws started to be challenged in the late sixties and the constitutional rights of the individual won out over the perceived health of us all. That is a paraphrase, but the point is to check when State health laws changed where you live and what changes may threaten you. It is impossible to eliminate everybody, if for no other reason than the age range of people who may not be current on all immunizations. At least you might find when mandatory immunizations stopped, to clear people over a certain age in the general population.
I saw a crack in the wall when I was sent to clean out our County Department of Public Health (c. 1967). It was a use it lose it detail and our high school biology department made out like bandits. In the middle of the plunder, I was clearing out a bunch of emergency medicines or something that seemed very important and I asked why they were closing down. “The war against disease is won” was yelled to anybody interested in hearing it by the director, lost in a file cabinet. Even in a shout it dripped with irony. I have been watching since. The future past was brave and a little foolish.
Even an old radio personality, Walter Winchell, got caught up in some conspiracy rumor about the last large trial of polio vaccine infecting many of the participants, and his big misinformed mouth went nationwide. It is estimated in the six months following his diatribe that derailed a planned national distribution, thirty thousand people contracted polio that otherwise would have not. That is about the estimated number of people with CF in the U.S., paralyzed by an entertainer mistaken for a sage.
There is good reason to be alert and informed when it comes to immunizations, even more so when it is your child. With the precipitous increase in forms of autism and ADD/ADHD and such, there are huge unanswered questions. But that is all they are. The very second a drug is found to cause something harmful like autism, it is out of here. Companies that manufacture and develop these drugs aren’t burning newspapers that give their drug bad press. Generally the first whiff of a rumor requires a company to investigate this potential side effect or that. It is called informed responsibility. Companies have a legal obligation to fix or remove a product once it is known to have unacceptable risks.
The culprits in the Winchell debacle were rumored to be Sabin verses Salk. My better angels say this can’t be true, like the discovery of insulin, there was glory enough for all. Ok, this is becoming a rant. The sad truth is competition in business sometimes reduces people to the very kind of ruthless practices like one drug manufacturer sabotaging a competitor, human lives be damned. The crap between Salk and Sabin seems to have merit. They probably weren’t the first and won’t be the last.
In the final analysis, you have to strike a balance between exposure to disease and socializing with the germ bags all humans are. It may be prudent and easier to protect yourself with a mask and the usual protocol for isolation rather than vetting every visitor for immunizations. It is still uncommon to see a person wearing a mask in public at least in the U.S. All of Asia and areas of Africa and Europe, a surgical mask in public is common and garners little attention or concern. Without a doubt children lacking our recommended immunizations have a special germ pool and need extra caution. Don’t forget a less than fully immunized child may have parents who aren’t either.
I had every available immunization on time and I still was a frightening spectacle. Imagine living next to me at age seven. I had gone temporarily deaf from a massive head infection followed by bacterial meningitis followed by encephalitis. Somewhere in there I was down with pneumonia. And I wanted to go out and play some of those sick days. Thank goodness my parents knew how dangerous I was to others. Almost any disease that has an immunization for it is very dangerous for a transplant patient.
LL
