Israeli epidemiologists and other public health experts are wringing their hands in fury and disappointment over more-extreme ultra-Orthodox (haredi) and even some who are refusing to vaccinate their toddlers or get vaccinated during pregnancy against potentially deadly pediatric diseases. Two Jerusalem infants have died in recent weeks from whooping cough (Bordetella pertussis ), a disease that should have disappeared long ago but has returned in the last two years or so. A seven-week-old girl was admitted a week ago to Jerusalem’s (SZMC) with severe brain seizures caused by meningitis because the haredi mother refused to be vaccinated against pertussis during her pregnancy.
Adults infected with pertussis cough violently for about three months but survive. Infants, however, can develop complications including mini-strokes, pneumonia, slowed or stopped breathing, dehydration or weight loss due to feeding difficulties, seizures, and even brain damage. Such pediatric diseases shouldn’t exist anymore.
It’s as if we’ve returned to 1860 when Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women told of the death of one daughter from contagious scarlet fever. “The newborn on our ward will probably survive but she is at high risk of serious damage for the rest of her life and could end up at public expense in the department of very damaged, ventilated children at Herzog Memorial Center,” bemoaned Prof. Yechiel Schlesinger, director of the SZMC’s Wilf Children’s Hospital and an ex.