A Canadian woman who had declined to have her children immunized against pertussis, better known as whooping cough, has changed her position now that all seven of her children have come down with the disease.
Tara Hills was stuck in isolation at her Ottawa home for more than a week with her sick children. Whooping cough, a bacterial infection, causes violent, uncontrollable coughing and is best known for the telltale sound victims make as they try to draw breath. Occasionally, it can be fatal, especially in infants less than a year old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Hills kids completed a course of antibiotics and were released from isolation Tuesday.
“I set out to prove that we were right,” Hills said, “and in the process found out how wrong we were.”
Vaccination rates in Canada, like those in United States, have waned in some communities, mostly as a result of increased skepticism about the dangers of immunization that have spread on the Internet despite overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are safe and effective. A debunked 1998 study linked the measles vaccine to autism. Canada and the U.S. have suffered large outbreaks of whooping cough and measles in recent years.
In an April 8 post she wrote for the blog , Hills offered many of the most common reasons for skepticism about vaccines. She and her husband had partially immunized their first three children but decided against any vaccines for the next four.
“We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust,” she wrote.
But when a small measles outbreak hit nearby, Hills was terrified. She planned to get her children up-to-date on their vaccines. But before that could happen, all her children came down with whooping cough.
The only silver lining about learning the hard way is the knowledge that minds can be changed on this subject, she said. “People like me who were hesitant, who were confused, who froze, we can be reached if people use the right approach,” she said.
