There were few excuses for staying home from school that carried weight with my mother.
Mention an outbreak of measles among classmates, however, and sleep-ins were ours.
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It was the 1950s. Just about everyone got the measles. The weird rash, the temperature, the ear infections – you put up with these things.
Parents dreaded the disease for more serious reasons. Sometimes pneumonia came with it, which could kill you.
![Legendary Australian cricketer Don Bradman signing a bat for a boy crippled by polio and wearing calipers.](/web/20170313230406im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/u/2/8/h/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gutzy1.png/1489371094182.jpg)
Worse, about one in every 1000 suffering measles developed encephalitis: inflammation of the brain. More than 10 per cent with encephalitis died, and up to 40 per cent of the rest were left with permanent brain damage.
And blindness. One of the more common entertainments in those far-off days, all but unknown now, was known as the "blind concert". Musicians, jugglers, singers and comics put on regular concerts in towns everywhere to raise money for the blind.
Mothers who were infected with rubella, otherwise known as German measles, often had babies who were blind and deaf.
Staying home from school, in truth, was all but pointless. About 97 per cent of us from those days, before the measles vaccine became available, suffered through a bout of it.
Our parents, however, thought of us as the lucky generation.
We were the first in the nation's history to get a jab that immunised us against poliomyelitis. We lined up in the schoolyard, a team of nurses brought out needles and we were given a jelly bean after.
Plenty of older children hobbled around the schoolyard in leg calipers because immunisation against polio hadn't been available in their early childhoods.
Apart from the legions who were crippled, 1013 died from polio in Australia between 1946 and 1955 alone.
There were other vaccines administered, too, including one for smallpox, which left a scar on the arm (I can still detect mine). It worked a miracle: smallpox, which killed a hideous 300-500 million people during the 20th century, was declared eradicated from the world in 1980.
We didn't have to worry much about diphtheria or whooping cough.
Vaccinations had been around since the 1920s for diphtheria – which in the decade from 1926-1935 killed 4073 Australian children, their throats closing off until they choked.
That same decade, whooping cough killed 2808 Australian children before vaccinations for the virus arrived about 10 years later.
In our blessed decade from the mid-'50s, just 44 Australians died from diphtheria, 58 from whooping cough, and 123 from polio. The figures were collated by Dr Brian Feery, eminent Australian scientist in the field of immunisation, in the Medical Journal of Australia, 1981.
Today, most people never think about diphtheria.
Deaths over 10 years from whooping cough can be counted on one hand. Polio was reduced to fewer than 100 cases in the entire world in 2015. Precisely one case has been recorded in Australia in the past 30 years – a traveller who was infected in Pakistan.
And measles?
Here's the Australian Immunisation Handbook, published by the Australian Department of Health (updated 2015): "Since the [National] Measles Control Campaign [in 1998], there have been no deaths recorded from measles, with the last measles death recorded in 1995."
There were 495 deaths from measles in my childhood decade alone, when Australia's population was less than half of today's.
The last measles panic I witnessed was in Rwanda in mid-1994, at the tail-end of genocide.
Measles had broken out among survivors in a rural area, and Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) had flown in a shipment of vaccine. But a generator had broken down and the vaccine, deprived of refrigeration, had been rendered useless. I recall a nurse in tears of frustration, knowing this meant that in this country of horrors, the race to easily prevent more suffering, from encephalitis, blindness and pneumonia, was over.
Yet still, in our own nation, where the evidence that vaccination works almost implausibly well has been evident all our lives, there remains scepticism right up to the leadership of at least one newly prominent political party, and anti-vaccination messages infest the internet.
Part of the scepticism clearly lies within the new international Trumpist political imperative that established orthodoxies – certainly those of the "elite", which presumably includes medical science – should be viewed as suspect.
Part of it has been fostered by a wicked paper published in 1998 suggesting a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The paper was proven to be false, its main author, Andrew Wakefield was struck off the medical register for professional misconduct, The Lancet retracted his work and millions were spent on numerous studies that found no link between vaccination and autism.
Some of the anti-vaccination brigade, however, have their roots – whether they know it or not – in a sentiment that caught alight in Bundaberg, Queensland, for perfectly understandable reasons.
In 1928, 12 Bundaberg children who had been injected with the diphtheria vaccine of the time (toxin-antitoxin) died. One family lost all three of its children. National and international alarm ensued, and as one journalist of the time observed, "immunisation is as popular as a death adder".
A royal commission run by three leading medical scientists found the local doctor had allowed his bottle of vaccine to become contaminated in the tropical heat. Nevertheless, years passed before immunisation regained acceptance. Old tragedies die hard, and it seems possible, even 89 years later, to trace at least some of the mistrust of government-supplied vaccines, particularly in country Queensland, to that tragedy of 1928, even if its details have been long forgotten.
None of the doubters, however, would have been given the time of day by my mother.
She died a few years ago.
Sorting through her carefully filed papers, I came across all the certificates detailing every one of her two sons' vaccinations and boosters, from the 1950s on.
They were, pretty clearly, treasured.
Proof of life, you might say.