Portland, Ore. – An unvaccinated 6-year-old Oregon boy was hospitalized for two months for tetanus and almost died of the bacterial illness after…
Portland, Ore. – An unvaccinated 6-year-old Oregon boy was hospitalized for two months for tetanus and almost died of the bacterial illness after getting a deep cut while playing on a farm, according to a case study published Friday by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The 2017 case is the first case of pediatric tetanus in Oregon in more than 30 years and alarmed infectious disease experts who said tetanus is almost unheard of in the U. S. since widespread immunization began in the 1940s.
The child received an emergency dose of the tetanus vaccine in the hospital, but his parents declined to give him a second dose – or any other childhood shots – after he recovered, the paper said.
“When I read that, my jaw dropped. I could not believe it. That’s a tragedy and a misunderstanding, and I’m just flabbergasted,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an expert in infectious diseases and chair at the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
“This is an awful disease, but… we have had a mechanism to completely prevent it, and the reason that we have virtually no cases anymore in the United States is because we vaccinate, literally, everyone.”
Doctors in Portland, Oregon, who treated the child declined to provide any further information about the family at a news conference Friday, citing medical privacy laws.
It was the first time that Dr. Judith Guzman-Cottrill, the pediatric infectious disease expert who treated the child, had ever seen tetanus because of widespread vaccination against it in the U.
