In re: Smallpox vaccination scars.

Like most southern Canadians of my age, I was vaccinated against smallpox as a toddler. At the age of 17, I was vaccinated again because I was going to France and had no documentary record of the original dose. In those days, a Canadian had to prove inoculation against smallpox after most foreign travel; only the United States, the United Kingdom and maybe the Nordic countries were exempt. Definitely not France.

Then I joined the armed forces and got vaccinated yet again, despite my fresh scar and the official record booklet that went with it. Each recruit was assumed to be an immunological tabula rasa, and we were inoculated against almost everything from mumps to yellow fever. Not cholera or plague, however, because the shots then available for those diseases gave only about six months of protection ( yellow fever was good for 10 years). Any deployment to a notorious hotbed (e.g., Congo) was always preceded by an extended visit to the warrant officer in the Preventive Medicine section.

So I once had three of those little round scars, two on the left shoulder and one on the right. Only the most recent, from 1974, is barely discernible now; the others have faded out of existence.

As for needle parades at school -- every year, from Grade One to Grade Six, with the entire school lined up for the village doctor and a nurse from the Carleton County public health office. It was a combined dose of typhoid, paratyphoid, tetanus and diphtheria (TABTD) and a separate needle for polio -- no oral vaccines on sugar cubes for us! The MMR vaccine -- targeting measles, mumps and rubella -- appeared well after I had survived all three diseases and left school. I've heard that, in Ontario, inoculation campaigns have even whooping cough and chicken pox on the run.

At age eight, when I was In Grade Four, I had whooping cough, rubella, and a full-blown case of red measles, all within a span of about eight months. No wonder I never really learned how to calculate with vulgar fractions.