The Viruses Among Us
It’s one of my earliest memories, although I’m not sure why. I have no idea how old I was or what it was about the dime-size scar on my mom’s upper left arm that captured my gaze. My fingers traced and retraced the indentation in her otherwise unblemished skin. I remember asking her what it was. She explained to me, in the way parents do when they’re trying to tell the truth without scaring their children, that when she was a little girl there was an illness that everyone had to get a shot for so they didn’t get sick. A look of dread must’ve registered in my eyes, because she said, “Don’t worry. You won’t have to get one. That sickness is gone now.”
The smallpox virus was indeed eradicated worldwide in 1980, about a year after I was born. My parents didn’t have to tote me down to a National Guard armory to receive that vaccine—as my mom’s parents did for her sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s—to protect me from that disfiguring and often deadly infection. Polio, too, was death-rattling in this country as I came into the world. However, my pediatrician still stuck a needle in my leg, an additional fail-safe nail in that disease’s proverbial coffin.
Although I can’t fault her for being imprecise with a toddler, my mom probably should’ve said I wouldn’t have to get vaccine in particular. Because the truth was that I was inoculated against lots of nasty diseases as a child,
