Unvaccinated Boy, 6, Spent 57 Days In The Hospital With Tetanus
A nurse holds a tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough vaccine in 2016. Physician Judith Guzman-Cottrill tells NPR that she has met many families who hesitate to give their children vaccines.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
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Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
A new report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention details the harrowing story of a child in Oregon who contracted tetanus because he wasn’t vaccinated.
The boy was playing outside on a farm in 2017 when he cut his forehead. Six days later, he started having symptoms: a clenched jaw, muscle spasms and involuntary arching of his neck and back. When he started struggling to breathe, his parents realized he needed help and called for emergency medical services.
Doctors diagnosed the 6-year-old boy with tetanus and administered a dose of the vaccine, but it took 57 days in a hospital, including 47 days in intensive care, to restore his health.
“It was difficult to take care of him, to watch him suffer,” says Judith Guzman-Cottrill, a pediatric infectious-disease physician who co-authored the article in the CDC’s online journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
At first, he asked for water but couldn’t open his mouth. The boy had to spend weeks in a dark room on a respirator. He was able to walk 20 feet, with help, after 50 days.
At a time when preventable outbreaks are making headlines in the United States, Guzman-Cottrill tells NPR that she has met many families who hesitate to give their children vaccines.
“These days, there are so many different places parents can go to for vaccine-related education and advice that many families struggle with knowing who to believe.”
The Internet and social media have made it harder for people to distinguish fact from fiction, she says.
The boy’s infection marked the first pediatric case of tetanus in the state of Oregon in more than 30 years, according to the researchers.
After allowing the first dose of vaccine, the parents refused a second dose for their son, despite doctors giving them information about the advantages of being immunized against tetanus. “I did provide education about the benefits of all pediatric vaccinations and that was also refused,” Guzman-Cottrill says.
The report of his illness comes after outbreaks of measles occurred this winter in the Pacific Northwest. Measles is also preventable with a vaccination.
The rise in measles cases, spurred by the anti-vaccination movement, is pushing authorities to address the issue.
On Tuesday, 18-year-old Ethan Lindenberger told lawmakers that his mother prevented him from getting immunizations because her Facebook feed turned her into an anti-vaxxer.
Facebook itself announced Thursday that it is using vaccine hoaxes identified by the World Health Organization, the CDC and other global organizations to address inaccurate information plaguing the site.
“As a parent myself, I understand that parents are trying to make the best decision for their child,” Guzman-Cottrill says.
“This illness could have been prevented with five doses of the tetanus vaccine, for $150,” she adds. Instead, the ordeal cost $811,929.
More Female Athletes Freeze Out Figure Skating In Favor Of Ice Hockey
More girls are taking to the ice — not as figure skaters — but as hockey players. NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with The Wall Street Journal’s Anne Marie Chaker about her report on girls in ice hockey.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
More girls are taking the ice – not as figure skaters, but as hockey players.
JULIETTE CHAKER BRAVIN: It’s fun to skate and to get the puck.
CLEMENTINE PARKER: I like going fast and…
JULIETTE: So do I.
CLEMENTINE: …Chasing the puck.
JULIETTE: So do I.
SHAPIRO: That’s Juliette Chaker Bravin and her teammate Clementine Parker. They are both 8, and you won’t catch either of them on the ice in sparkly leotards.
CLEMENTINE: I don’t want to do figure skating because there’s music involved, and it’s hard to do with music.
JULIETTE: Yeah. You get all distracted.
CLEMENTINE: You don’t wear pads. And if you fall, it will hurt.
JULIETTE: Would you rather play a game or twirl and dance? I would rather play a game.
SHAPIRO: Well, Anne Marie Chaker is hockey coach to Clementine, coach and mom to Juliette, and she’s a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who wrote a piece this week titled, “For Many Girls, Figure Skating Loses Its Edge To Hockey.” Anne Marie, thanks for coming in.
ANNE MARIE CHAKER: Thank you so much.
SHAPIRO: So we should say you are not a neutral party here. You are a former competitive figure skater-turned-hockey coach. So you have a bit of an angle on this.
CHAKER: Yeah. So I grew up just a total rink rat. In the ’80s and ’90s, figure skating was super cool, and I just – I loved the 6 a.m. practices, I loved the music, all of it. And it was very – the lines were very clearly drawn. It was, like, the girls were over at this sheet of ice doing the figure skating, and the boys were over here stinking up the place doing the hockey.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter). And today?
CHAKER: Today, there’s a lot of girls playing hockey. The figure skating ice, there’s maybe two or three girls on the ice, but not much more than that.
SHAPIRO: You dug into the numbers for your Wall Street Journal story. How fast is this growing?
CHAKER: It kind of started to take off 1998, when the women debuted at the Olympics. And then in the early 2000s, the numbers started to really soar. When I looked at the USA hockey data, I was really surprised to see, like, in the last 10 years, the growth has really skyrocketed, like, 50 percent.
SHAPIRO: I think a lot of people think of it as a very violent sport where people get injured. And, like, to take a puck to the face, that doesn’t deter these girls at all.
CHAKER: It doesn’t. And, you know, watching them and coaching them has been so interesting because at the beginning of the season, it’s the boys that dominate everything. There’s, like, 60 to 80 boys on the ice. And the girls, there’s maybe six to 10 of them. They kind of seek each other out.
SHAPIRO: So these are co-ed teams.
CHAKER: They’re co-ed teams. And then something happens. We have this all-girls tournament in February, and it’s the first time that they see other teams of all girls. And it’s, like, the power of seeing other female hockey players just like them, they feel like this belongs to them.
SHAPIRO: How much of this is connected to the success of female role models in ice hockey and the kind of absence of super high-profile figure skaters who are dominating the conversation?
CHAKER: I think it’s huge. You know, when the women’s Olympic ice hockey team won…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: She has stopped. United States wins gold.
CHAKER: …I mean, Kendall Coyne competed for the first time at the All-Stars in the fastest skater event.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: An outstanding job by Kendall Coyne. Watch the feet move there. The angles are…
CHAKER: Those are eye-opening moments that answer the question, I think, for a lot of girls, like, can we do this? Yes. We can totally do this, and this is what it looks like.
SHAPIRO: This is such a recent trend. Has there been a moment on the ice that has just shocked you, seeing little girls do something that you had not seen them do before?
CHAKER: My girls, I was trying to explain to them the idea of aggression. You know, little girls are taught to be polite, to be good. And I was trying to get them to understand that that all flies out the window in hockey. Do we know what aggressive means? And I was trying to – and when we came back from that tournament, my daughter, who had kind of been afraid of the puck, just turned into this beast. And I was so proud of her.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
CHAKER: She had scored her first goal, and there was just, like, a little cocky swagger. Like, it was hers now. It was…
SHAPIRO: Permission to really go for it.
CHAKER: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
SHAPIRO: Anne Marie Chaker, thank you so much.
CHAKER: Oh, my God. This was so fun. Thank you.
SHAPIRO: She is life and arts writer for The Wall Street Journal and a hockey mom and coach.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
In One Pennsylvania County, Economic Woes Impact Political Leanings
Labor uncertainty in Erie County, Pa. — a county that narrowly flipped for Donald Trump in 2016 — may now be impacting how voters in the region feel about the president.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
One of the keys to President Trump’s success in the 2016 election was his campaign promise to bring back American manufacturing jobs. This week, some 1,700 union members at a manufacturing plant in northwest Pennsylvania were on picket lines in a labor dispute with their employer. NPR’s Don Gonyea was there. He spoke with them about the president, the economy and the 2020 presidential race.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: (Over loudspeaker) What do we want?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Fair contract.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: (Over loudspeaker) When do we want it?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Now.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: This demonstration took place this week outside of Pittsburgh at the headquarters of Wabtec Cooperation. Many of the picketers with the Union of Electrical Workers came by bus two hours from Erie, Pa., where they had been on strike for more than a week. The issue – a concessionary contract that would include lower wages for new hires.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Unintelligible) is a union town. Stand up, stand down. Erie is a union town. Stand up, stand down.
GONYEA: The strike has since ended as negotiations continue, but it’s where I talk with union member Sharon Ruperto.
Can I ask who you voted for for president?
SHARON RUPERTO: Trump.
GONYEA: You voted for Trump.
RUPERTO: Yes.
GONYEA: Are you still on board with Trump?
RUPERTO: Yes, I am.
GONYEA: Trump narrowly won Erie County, Pa., a place that had gone twice by wide margins for Barack Obama. Trump’s win there and statewide in Pennsylvania was helped by votes from white working-class voters, many of them union members. Ruperto drives a forklift at the plant and says she’s an Obama voter who switched to Trump. She thinks Democrats have moved too far to the left, and she doesn’t know why union leaders are so quick to vilify Trump.
RUPERTO: Trump hasn’t said anything about a union. I have not heard him try to break unions. They keep saying he’s against unions, but I’ve never seen him go after a union.
GONYEA: The unemployment rate in Erie County has improved by two points since Trump took office. It’s now 4.7 percent. But while the president pledged to bring back manufacturing, the share of the local workforce represented by manufacturing jobs continues to decline. That and the strike add to the anxiety of workers like 55-year-old Ron Dombkowski.
RON DOMBKOWSKI: I can show you pictures of me at the Trump rallies because I was a Trump supporter, a big Donald Trump supporter because I wanted to keep jobs in America.
GONYEA: Today, he sees pressure to cut wages at his own plant. He sees the big GM Lordstown assembly plant nearby in Ohio closing. He sees his son, even with a college degree, struggling to make a decent wage. I asked him about Trump.
You’re kind of soft-spoken when you’re talking about him, and is it disappointment with him?
DOMBKOWSKI: Well, I’m also a veteran, so I like what he wants to do, you know, for people in the armed forces and for veterans. So, I mean, yeah, there’s still things I like about Donald Trump, but I think he’s letting the American worker down.
GONYEA: Donald Trump no longer has his vote. Sixty-year-old union member Dale Meyer was also at the protest.
DALE MEYER: Yeah. I mean, there are some of us that do agree with Trump, and there’s a lot of people that don’t agree with Trump.
GONYEA: OK. So you voted for Trump.
MEYER: I did. I did.
GONYEA: Are you still with him?
MEYER: I’m not against him, but I would be with him…
GONYEA: But he is far from gung-ho and says he’s not sure how he’ll vote in 2020. Scott Slawson is president of the Union of Electrical Workers in Erie. It’s a union that endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Slawson says Democrats better have learned this lesson – never to take votes for granted.
SCOTT SLAWSON: Back in 2016, Donald Trump took this county. And I think one of the fatal mistakes that was made was the Democrats just simply overlooked this county.
GONYEA: As for union members who voted Trump, Slawson says they’ve always made up their own minds. Slawson says there are signs of renewed union activism nationally. He points to all the teachers’ strikes we’re seeing. That, he says, is an opportunity, but you still have to do the work to convert it into votes in Erie, Pa., or anywhere. Don Gonyea, NPR News.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
