Get the jag, please!

Every day right now I'm seeing babies and small children on the TV very sick with whooping cough. I also heard today that a former colleague in her 60s has been quite ill all summer with the same illness. So far, 10 babies - 10 - have died of whooping cough in this country this year. That's not just 10 lives lost but 10 families devastated by their loss.

I never thought we'd reach this stage again. When I was a child, Scotland was awash in terrible illnesses: TB was rampant. My own mother in 1940s Glasgow almost died of diphtheria. Even in the 50s - the 1950s, that is! - it was a lottery who got which childhood ailments. There were so many that we all kept a wee NHS card on which our parents had to record what illnesses we'd had - scarlet fever, mumps, measles, German measles, chicken pox, whooping cough - and when we'd had them. I was lucky but my sister got everything. As she got each illness, she  got steadily weaker and thinner. Scarlet fever in particular had the doctor and my parents worried about her heart. It took years for her immune system to build back up. In my 20s, I worked with a woman of about 40 who had had smallpox in her childhood. She was left physically scarred and with her immune system shot to pieces. She got every bug and virus that was going around and was always afraid of contracting another illness like it.

My former colleague who got whooping cough this summer probably wasn't vaccinated against it in her childhood and the babies who died this year were maybe too young to be vaccinated, but there's now a vaccine available for mothers which will protect their babies in the womb. I heard a pregnant woman say on the radio earlier today that she would need to 'do some research' before deciding whether to be vaccinated. What's to research? A quick look on the internet will let you to compare the effects of the vaccine and the truly awful effects of whooping cough.

Why such suspicion of modern medecine? Partly I blame the maniac UK doctor who persuaded a whole generation of parents not to give their children the MMR vaccine, on the grounds that it caused autism. Austism is a very serious condition but, of course, its causes have turned out be much more complex than a simple vaccination. Meanwhile, a generation of children have been left unprotected and a generation of parents have been left suspicious of every vaccination available. I heard today that pregnant women are even refusing the flu jag. If you've ever had the flu - the real flu, not man flu or a bad cold - you'll know how debilitating it is. I know of a young woman who had swine flu about 6 years ago and who recently died of cancer at the age of 39 and I'm sure the flu contributed to her death by damaging her immune system.

So what do I want to tell people? I want to tell young parents especially: protect your unborn and brand new babies. There is nothing more precious. But if you want to be there as they grow up, protect yourselves as well. Have the jag!