From the Desk of the President-Elect: “I never thought that I would see the return of these illnesses…”

From the Desk of the President-Elect:

Over the past 35 years of my medical career, I’ve seen tremendous progress towards saving children from preventable illnesses. I am old enough to have seen the morbidity and mortality from H. flu, S.pneumoniae, varicella, and rotavirus infections. While in the U.S. Navy, I cared for children in Tongatapu during a measles epidemic and watched a baby die in their mother’s arms.

I never thought that I would see the return of these illnesses or feel the despair that I am for the recurrent attacks on our professional world. It feels like each day it just gets worse.

And yet, families keep coming to see us and give us the opportunity to improve the health of their children. It is truly an honor by which I’m often humbled. We need to remember these moments. Just the other day I was seeing a baby for their 4 month well visit. The family had given the Hep B vaccine at birth but had refused any further vaccinations. During the visit, they began to tell me their fears about vaccines, how they’ve read they cause autism and other problems. I listened to them and in turn, they listened to me. At the end of the visit, they agreed to give their baby her recommended vaccines. It was the high point of my day.

We are very fortunate to be practicing pediatrics in a state whose government is actively working to maintain Medicaid coverage, school lunches, and SNAP benefits. Our state has vowed to continue our current vaccine policy and support the recommended childhood vaccine schedule through the VFC program. We helped form the Northeast Public Health Collaborative to protect and support evidence based public health. Across the nation, you can see other promising responses like the Vaccine Integrity Project out of CIDRAP, aimed at providing deep dive authority on vaccine related research, and the Evidence Collective, helping to guide more effective science communication.

So, while some days feel very difficult, we are not alone. We need to help and support each other as well as the communities for which we provide pediatric care.

Please reach out and share ways in which we can better support each other and let us know if you’d like to get more involved in the CT-AAP.

Sincerely,

Miriam Cohen, MD, FAAP
President elect CT-AAP
Contact: info@ct-aap.org