23. Understanding the Vaccines and The Diseases They Prevent

In this week’s episode of Nourished with Dr. Anikó, Dr. Anikó concludes her powerful three-part vaccine series with an in-depth look at the devastating diseases vaccines were designed to prevent: polio, pertussis, and measles and why remembering their true impact is essential to protecting future generations.

With her signature blend of medical expertise and heartfelt storytelling, Dr. Anikó brings these illnesses to life through vivid history, global context, and real patient stories. From the paralyzing grip of polio that confined President FDR to a wheelchair, to the heartbreaking realities of whooping cough in infants, and the staggering global toll of measles, this episode exposes how far we’ve come and what’s at risk if we forget.

Dr. Anikó also shares a deeply personal story from her medical training that reshaped her own view on vaccine-preventable diseases, reminding listeners that even “common” childhood illnesses like chickenpox can lead to devastating complications.

You’ll learn why measles remains one of the most contagious and deadly diseases in the world, how vaccine refusal has led to dangerous resurgences, and why community protection, herd immunity, matters now more than ever.

If you’ve ever wondered how diseases like polio or measles could still threaten our modern world, or why vaccines are given at specific ages, this episode will shift your perspective and deepen your understanding of public health’s most important tool: preventative vaccines.

Episode Highlights:
02:00 Polio and President FDR’s story: how paralysis changed the world
05:00 The lasting effects of post-polio syndrome
08:00 The reality of pertussis (whooping cough) and why early treatment matters
12:00 Measles and the origins of vaccine misinformation
15:00 The truth about chickenpox and its hidden dangers
17:00 Measles’ staggering global death toll and why complacency is dangerous
20:00 Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis: delayed, fatal measles complication
23:00 The resurgence of measles and the cost of vaccine refusal
25:00 Understanding shared responsibility: how community immunity protects all

Through science, compassion, and perspective, Dr. Anikó reminds us that forgetting the lessons of history is one of the greatest risks to our collective health. Vaccines are not just about individual choice they’re about protecting those who can’t protect themselves.

Tune in now to learn, reflect, and remember what’s truly at stake when we choose not to vaccinate.

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Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

​[00:00:00] 

Dr. Anikó: Hello. Hello y'all and welcome back to Nourished with Dr. Aniko. Last week was part two in our vaccine series, pun intended 'cause that's what they call it when you get your series of vaccines. Last week we covered some of the diseases that vaccines were developed to prevent. It got a little long. we got a little into medical school.

This week I'm going to continue and finish up talking about some of the diseases that [00:01:00] we have developed vaccines to prevent. Thank you so much for being here. So yeah, let's jump right in. Poliovirus is a virus that mainly affects the nerves in the spinal cord or the brainstem, and in its most severe form, it can lead to paralysis.

Which can lead to trouble breathing because one of the muscles that gets paralyzed is your diaphragm, which enables you to breathe and that can cause death. And there's been global vaccination efforts that have reduced the incidences of the disease all over the world. But there still are polio cases in areas that have low vaccination rates.

And people who are carrying the virus might not even have symptoms. They might not even know that they have polio and are carrying it. The well-known way that it spreads is through feces or stool. So that's why when there were the polio outbreaks in the us. They were keeping their kids out of [00:02:00] pools.

Even though chlorine can kill polio, not all of the pools were chlorinated. Not all of the swimming holes, for example, were chlorinated. So that's one way that it spreads, but it can also spread from sneezing and coughing. It's one of the reasons it's so important to wash your hands after using the bathroom, for example.

It mainly affects kids under the age of five. One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, and among those who are paralyzed, five to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.

 So y'all may remember FDR, he was the president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, and he was diagnosed with polio at the age of 39. So he had fevers, he had a paralysis that went up his body, he had facial paralysis and he couldn't control his bowels or bladder. He almost died [00:03:00] actually. And he spent years in therapy trying to recover some function, but he remained paralyzed from the waist down because of this infection.

And he was wheelchair bound, so he would sometimes be photographs standing, but he would need leg braces to do that because he was paralyzed and they would often photograph him from angles where you couldn't. See the wheelchair, he would just be seated because they didn't think that was very presidential for a president to be in a wheelchair.

And he remains the only president of the United States that has ever been disabled, and they had to install wheelchair ramps into the White House before he took office because they didn't have any before then. And he actually founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which led to the development of polio vaccines.

So it was a really, really huge thing. Obviously it meant a great deal to him to make sure that [00:04:00] nobody, no children, nobody would get infected with polio because it had been so devastating to his life. An interesting wrinkle in this story is that modern doctors, when they look back at his symptoms, he certainly definitely could have had polio for sure.

He could have, but he also maybe could have had something called Guillain-Barre syndrome. Which is when your body's immune system attacks the nerves, and it too can cause weakness, numbness, and paralysis, and it typically happens after an infection. So two thirds of people who have Mbar syndrome, and it's a rare syndrome.

But it happens. And two thirds of people who have Guillain-Barre syndrome had symptoms of an infection in the six weeks before the Guam Barre symptoms began. And those infections could be gastrointestinal, they could be respiratory, [00:05:00] and a few organisms that we know have been linked to triggering Guillain-Barre syndrome are COVID-19, the Zika virus and the flu virus as well.

So, like I said. He absolutely could have had polio, but at this point we would need a spinal tap to be able to tell if he had polio or Mbar syndrome. Either way, though, it highlights the point of how dangerous diseases are because they can trigger massive, even autoimmune reactions in your body. That can be devastating.

 I mean, Mbar syndrome, usually people recover, but sometimes people are permanently paralyzed and sometimes they die. So just another. Highlight of why vaccines are so amazing and preventing illness is so important. And in FDRs time in this country, not only was Polio terrifying, it was common. I mean, the reason that the foundation [00:06:00] he founded was called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was because that's what polio was called, the time because it was paralysis that affected infants and children.

Dr. Anikó: There were whole iron lung units in the hospitals, particularly in children's hospitals, where kids would be like in this iron machine that often had a mirror on it so that they could see the people who were sitting next to them or standing next to them.

Really, really intense stuff y'all. So it's no surprise that when the polio vaccine came out, people were lining up for it because they had been terrorized by this disease and how it was immobilizing, paralyzing. Killing children. Additionally, there is a special type of syndrome that polio can cause That's called post-polio syndrome, and the signs and symptoms of this will [00:07:00] appear years.

After the initial infection, and it can be new signs or symptoms or just the progression of problems. So maybe you were left with like a little bit of muscle weakness, but it's okay. Years later, it can start to progress to the point that you now have breathing or swallowing problems years after your initial infection, years after your supposed recovery.

And there were many cases where people were alive. But so weakened and they would have to go through massive physical therapy, be bedridden, have rods inserted into their spine so they could have some ability to sit up and stand up. I mean, people lost so much of their childhood to this disease, even if they didn't die because of it.

I mean, anyone who is either personally or professionally familiar with polio. Is so flabbergasted to think that someone would [00:08:00] not celebrate their opportunity to be vaccinated for polio because it is such a ravaging disease. Pertussis is another illness that a lot of people have had, right? Whooping cough.

There's that classic like, cough, cough, cough. You know, I'm gonna make myself cough with my sound effects. Um, in kids and especially in babies, they can get exhausted and have. Apnea where they stop breathing and they can also develop pneumonia so they can die of pneumonia or not being able to breathe.

And pertussis is also an organism that has a toxin and pertussis toxin can cause encephalitis and death. Encephalitis is the inflammation of the actual brain tissue. And even if you were to not get something as severe as fatal pneumonia or encephalitis, the coughing from pertussis [00:09:00] can be so severe that it can cause rib fractures and about one third of kids.

So that's a lot of kids who get pertussis under the age of one need to be treated in a hospital. So this is no joke. Y'all needing hospital treatment in one third of kids under one who get pertussis is significant. The other thing that a lot of people outside of the healthcare world, or if you haven't had a personal experience with pertussis, is that we have antibiotics for pertussis, but they don't work once the disease has advanced.

So if you are not getting treated within the first one to two weeks before you get these coughing fits, which we call parms, then the treatment is ineffective and you're stuck. Sitting with your kid at night, having these horrible coughing fits that are painful, that might even be [00:10:00] causing rib fractures, and you can't really treat them.

You just have to kind of wait until it resolves on its own. And one of the classic presentations of pertussis is. These littles who are like cough, cough, cough, vomit, like they cough so hard and so much that they're vomiting. So that can cause nosebleeds. That can cause hernias 'cause they're coughing so hard that can cause them to pass out.

And more severe complications can be encephalopathy. We already talked about how the toxin can produce it. It can also be caused by hypoxia because your brain isn't getting enough oxygen because of all the coughing it can cause pneumothorax. Which is when air gets into the cavity around your lung, which then causes your lung to either partially or completely collapse.

It can cause seizures and convulsions, and it can even cause subdural hematomas, which is when basically there's a blood collection between your [00:11:00] brain and its most outer covering, and the US actually had the most whooping cough deaths. Since 2017, in 2024, with most cases being in Florida, it used to be Ohio, and most happened in kids under five, but about a third of those deaths were in older children as well.

So that is pertussis. And now it's time to move on to measles. And the reason that we talk so much about measles. There's a lot of reasons. We talk a lot about measles. One is that it was the MMR vaccine. That was the one that was implicated in the fraudulent research that was done in the nineties that sort of set off this spark that caught on like wildfire, that vaccines cause autism.

Specifically the measles vaccine caused autism. That obviously did not start from a place that was. Sound from a research point of view, it started based on lies [00:12:00] and also the research since then has shown again and again and again that vaccines don't cause higher rates of autism. The other things about measles are that the vaccines that prevent measles.

Are credited with saving the most lives globally. And one of the reasons for that is that measles is incredibly contagious, and that's one of the main reasons that healthcare professionals are so terrified, essentially, of a resurgence of measles because it is so easily spread and it can be deadly. Now before I dig into measles, I'm really dragging this out y'all, but I wanted to share a story from my own perspective because a lot of people who I hear being super casual about measles are either people whose like grandma had it or maybe they grew up in a different country and they had it, or whatever.

They're just very ca about measles. [00:13:00] So when I was a resident. I took care of a little human who came into the hospital because they could not walk, and the reason that they could not walk was because they had chickenpox and they had developed a complication called transverse myelitis, which basically means that because of the infection, the area around the spinal cord gets inflamed.

There's nothing happening below that level in the spinal cord. So this little person had no bowel or bladder control. They could not move their legs, they couldn't obviously walk. Um, they couldn't move their arms and they could talk and all those things, but below that level of their spinal cord, they couldn't do anything.

And y'all, before that happened in my life. I felt pretty casual about chickenpox because guess what? I had had chickenpox as a kid and I'd been itchy, and I [00:14:00] remember being in like cornstarch baths and I remember my mom telling me that I had had a really high fever and I was hallucinating, but like nothing happened, I was fine.

And the only other people I knew who'd had any kind of complications were from scarring, and that's not insignificant. Let's also name that, that it's not insignificant to. Live the rest of your life with scarring on your face that you're really self-conscious about because you had chickenpox. But until I met this little person, I don't think the weight of what these diseases could do, even if you had personal familiarity with it and you were fine.

That doesn't mean that everybody is fine, and transverse myelitis is a rare complication of chickenpox. The most common central nervous system complication of chickenpox and contracting chickenpox is actually encephalitis, which we talked about [00:15:00] earlier. This type of encephalitis, which is called varice zoster virus encephalitis, because the same virus that causes chickenpox also causes shingles.

Varicella zoster virus encephalitis in immunocompetent people. So your average person that does not have any immunocompromised is 15%. That's still not great, but varicella zoster virus encephalitis in immunocompromised people is 

100% fatal if left untreated. That is obviously a massive number. It's obviously hugely significant and incredibly dangerous. 

Dr. Anikó: So again. Just because you have a lived experience that was easy, breezy, no big deal, doesn't mean that these diseases still aren't super scary on a global public health level.

And [00:16:00] it also doesn't mean that you're not gonna be in that percent because there were no risk factors that this little person had. They just happened to have a body that responded this way to chickenpox instead of another kind of way. So that leads me to measles, and the reason that I took that little detour through chickenpox is because one of the reasons I hear from people that they don't want to vaccinate for measles beyond just the.

Totally debunked at this point, perception that vaccines cause autism is that measles isn't a big deal. Like my grandma had measles, somebody they know had measles and it was fine. And in general, you're right, it usually is fine unless it's not, and you have no way of knowing if you or your child. [00:17:00] Is going to fall into the category of, it's not.

Okay. So remember we talked about how in particular the measles vaccine has saved so many lives since vaccine programs were implemented. And so it's estimated that since the seventies, vaccination has saved 154 million lives, and that includes 146 million children younger than five years. And the measles vaccine in particular has saved 94 million lives over the last 50 years.

That's more than 60% of that total, so that's why in some ways we hyperfocus on measles because it's such a big piece of the pie and it's so easy to catch it. Again, one of the reasons we're so cavalier about it is that measles used to be an extremely common disease, and just 60 years [00:18:00] ago, over 90% of children would've been infected by it.

But of those who developed symptoms, about 25% would be hospitalized. That's a lot of kids hospitalized. Not only is that a lot of illness and deaths and blindness and deafness and all of those things, it's also a lot of hospital resources that we just don't have a lot to go around right now. And I keep talking about how measles is highly contagious.

So I'm gonna give you some numbers too. Kind of try to conceptualize that. So if one person has measles, up to nine out of 10 people nearby to that person will become infected if they are not protected. It spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. So you can get measles just by being in a room where a person with measles has been.

You don't even have to be with them in the room. If you are in a room [00:19:00] where a person with measles has been, you can be infected with measles up to two hours after that person has left. This is why y'all, this is why from a public health and just health professional level, not protecting ourselves against measles is perhaps one of the most dangerous tools to release, or in some cases actively attack.

Because a measles resurgence can happen faster than you can even imagine, and that's one of the reasons that measles is one of the diseases that you have to report to the health department. It's considered one that requires mandatory reporting. So again. Usually things are okay with measles, but because it's so contagious and so many people get [00:20:00] it, so many people have serious complications.

So about one in every 1000 measles cases will develop acute encephalitis. We already talked about encephalitis, and that often results in permanent brain damage. One to three out of every 1000 children who become infected with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications. And there's a special thing called SSPE.

It's subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. It's rare, but it's a fatal and degenerative disease where you have. Behavioral and intellectual deterioration, so you become over time more and more delayed essentially. And then seizures that generally develop about seven to 10 years after measles infection. So a little bit similar to that post-polio syndrome that we talked about.

[00:21:00] You can have. This deterioration that happens years after you had the measles, and it is rare, but it is fatal. The mortality rate in SSP is about 95%, and the average lifespan after you first start developing symptoms is about 3.8 years, and there's no known cure at this time. And measles is still endemic in many countries where there's poor access to vaccination.

So one of the questions that I get because my patients know that I have kids is, did you vaccinate your kids? And I say, absolutely. Not only were they vaccinated for MMR, but they both got their vaccines early because we were traveling to a country where measles was endemic when they were babies. So the reason that we give the measles vaccine [00:22:00] when we do is because if we give it to early, then the antibodies that mom has for measles.

Compromises how effective that vaccine is for baby. So it compromises their lasting immunity. So my kids needed to get an extra MMR vaccine basically to compensate for that. So even if you get it before the age of 12 to 15 months, you still need to get. Your vaccines as scheduled because that one before 12 to 15 months just doesn't provide that lasting immunity that the other ones will.

And so we know that measles remains endemic in many countries that have poor access to vaccination, but there's also been a reemergence of measles in industrialized countries due to vaccination refusal. And actually, in 2019, there was a 300% [00:23:00] increase in reported measles cases compared to the previous year since.

2010, the measles virus has killed more than a hundred thousand people per year, most of whom were less than five years old. So this is what I mean when I talk about how the scariest thing in the room for healthcare providers and people in public health is very, very different from the scariest thing in the room that often the general public is familiar with.

That fear needs to be met and held and discussed, but the facts also need to be shared and held right, and the fact is that these diseases are far more dangerous to ourselves and our kids than vaccines are.

And vaccines come with risk too. Anybody that tells you otherwise. [00:24:00] Is either lying or not wanting to square themselves with the truth, but compared to the diseases that vaccines were developed to prevent, like I said in the last episode, it's just no contest.

The diseases win every single time, and that's why, even though it feels like dissonance sometimes. People in healthcare and people in the public, we're all acting from the same fear. Except my fear is that these diseases are going to harm your child because I have seen the harm that these diseases can do, and I have seen them in a way that I will never forget.

Right. And it's not just, you know, it's where that individual community responsibility. Intersects Right and overlaps because [00:25:00] you don't make the decision not to vaccinate your child, particularly for measles. Particularly for measles in isolation. Because measles is so contagious. You are making that decision not just for yourself, but for your community, for people who can't get vaccinated, because there is a percentage of people who cannot because of immunocompromised or severe vaccine reactions or a host of other things.

It is that way that we do need to meet one another and acknowledge and. Reckon with, at the end of the day, the reality that the choices we make ultimately affect everyone. And so we need to make the choices that are not just based in an emotional truth, but when it comes to things like diseases in science, they have to align with the [00:26:00] factual truth as well.

And that's another reason it's so important. We can't just be like b. That's a stupid thing to be afraid of. It isn't a stupid thing to be afraid of vaccines if you have no familiarity with the diseases, it's not, it makes perfect sense. And if we don't meet that fear, then we then can't have a collective conversation about the true dangers that these diseases pose and how.

It is only by acting collectively as a community that we can protect ourselves and one another. And I really hope this leaves you feeling inspired to connect with one another and also inspired by the power that we have to take care of not just our little nuclear family, but our community and ultimately the whole world.

It is such a [00:27:00] privilege to be having these conversations with y'all and to be taking care of the world together. I hope you have such a wonderful day. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll see y'all next time. I. [00:28:00]