Holy Moly: Tetanus!

photo: Just like this bee, gardens can sting you.



Went to the public health nurse today so she could read my TB test. Had to get a TB test because there is tuberculosis in the area and I work with school kids. When I got the under-the-skin-shot to see if I have any antibodies, I said I should get a reaction since everyone had to get TB and polio vaccine when I was growing up (mine was a sugar cube). I mentioned I didn’t get a scar from the TB test. She checked. Sure enough: no scar. She said it must not have worked.
Humph.
No reaction. Went back in three days. She confirmed this. Guess it didn’t work. There are no effective TB vaccinations for adults. We talked about vaccinations in general and she asked if I wanted a tetanus shot. I was pretty sure I’d had one in the last ten years, but not exactly when. My records are with my doc.
She told me in 2007 three seniors who had been working in their gardens on Vancouver Island in British Columbia died of tetanus.
Died? Scraped their finger on something in the garden soil? Nope, she said, tetanus is present everywhere in soil, you don’t need a rusty nail. The victims must not have realized what was wrong, tetanus not being anything we worry about in these days of H1N1.
Lockjaw kills, pretty quickly, she said. Can’t breathe. I checked: mortality rates range from 10 to 50 percent. They were 100 percent in BC.
She said a lot of seniors were courting tetanus because they don’t keep their immunizations up. Probably don’t even think about it. More worried by the flu. Seniors should have tetanus, flu and the pneumonia shot., but many don’t know it. There aren’t any school nurses to send reminders to seniors’ homes
You need a booster every 10 years for sure, but if you know you haven’t had one in five years, you can have one without doing harm.
So I got the shot.
My goal is to be able to remember in 2020 that I need another one.

SLI