A few winters ago I was the attending physician on the inpatient service at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center. A 3-month-old girl was admitted to our team with breathing difficulties. She had pertussis: an infection that causes the throat to be so irritated that the child will cough-cough-cough-cough-cough without any let up, to the point where she turns blue from lack of oxygen. Exhausted, the child then rapidly inhales air through a ravaged windpipe so rapidly that it produces a piercing sound known as a "whoop," leading to the other name for pertussis — whooping cough. Her parents stood by helplessly as she tried desperately to take in oxygen through her raw, inflamed throat. She had not been vaccinated because of things her parents had heard about vaccines that scared them. After five days she recovered, but her parents told me they had no idea what fear was until they saw their daughter near the edge of death.

She was one of three pertussis patients admitted to my service that winter, and the numbers have been creeping up every year. And every one of those cases could have been prevented.

Vaccines save lives. That's the plain and simple truth. Yet in recent years some parents have declined routine vaccines for their children, while many more parents have raised concerns about the safety of vaccines and how they are given.

Because they have been so spectacularly successful at reducing the incidence of certain infections, vaccines may very well be victims of their own success. Many of today's parents have never seen a case of whooping cough, measles or meningitis. As a physician, I have seen all these diseases. Not only do they still exist, they're having resurgence as a result of declining vaccination rates. If the number of children being vaccinated continues to decrease, we can once again expect epidemics to develop in children, especially in children school age and younger.

Why are vaccination rates declining?

Parents were skeptical of vaccines long before the Lancet published — and later retracted — Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper, which suggested a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, or Jenny McCarthy scared millions of Oprah viewers about the "dangers" of vaccines. What Wakefield's paper and subsequent claims did was give parents a 'scientific" excuse to fear vaccines. Although his claims have been thoroughly discredited, that paper, coupled with unbalanced media reports, passionate Internet postings and emotion-filled rumors, rather than evidence-based science, has left many well-intentioned parents questioning the safety and necessity of vaccines.

Some parents mistakenly believe that children's immune systems can be overwhelmed by vaccines. Yet infants and children routinely deal with many germs just by playing, eating and breathing. Their immune systems fight those germs to keep the body healthy. Every single day a child's immune system deals with 2,000-6,000 antigens, the unique proteins on germs that the body recognizes as foreign, vastly more than the 150 or so antigens that the child's system encounters over a year and a half for the whole current vaccine schedule.

Parents, I understand that the very idea of allowing your child to be injected with a foreign agent is, at the very least, unsettling to even the most educated, most rational person. As human beings this seems unnatural, and the best option may seem to be to take your chances and do nothing. I also know that your concerns are based in love for your child. But I want to encourage you to talk with your child's pediatrician about your concerns. Get the facts and then make the decision that is best for your children. You and I want the same thing — to keep your children safe and healthy.

What I do not want is to see another 3-month-old baby girl nearly die from a vaccine-preventable case of whooping cough while her family watches helplessly nearby.

As parents, it is natural and even healthy to experience fear when you perceive threats to your child. But fears that are based in myth are a waste of your energy and will lead to an unhealthy response. I can tell you from years of hard experience that there is plenty to fear from illnesses that are very capable of afflicting your child and are sadly becoming more common. Vaccines are a reality-based way to confront these fears and bring us — and our children — to a place of hope.

Dr. Ken Haller is a SLUCare pediatrician at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center.