“Vaccinating your children is giving them better opportunities”: Roxana Castillo, polio survivor and vaccine specialist from Honduras

Honduras has celebrated 32 years since the last recorded case of poliomyelitis and that fact is as shocking as it is hopeful, since despite being a latent threat, it is possible to control it.

Dr. Roxana Elizabeth Castillo Rivera Works in the parasitology laboratory of the “Alonso Suazo” Health Center, the largest in the Honduran capital, where she is responsible for the surveillance the pneumococcal, meningococcal pneumonia, and rotavirus vaccines. 50 years ago, shortly before her first birthday, she contracted polio, a crippling disease. Since then, vaccines and knowledge about them have been reoccurring themes in her life.

“The girl who helped in the house was told that her little girl was unwell. The child had polio, but we didn’t know that. Her condition was very delicate, serious and she died soon after, but in those days, I lived with her, we shared toys and food. The transmission is fecal or oral, so there had to be some contact with the virus and it affected me. Above all my right side, the lower extremities”, related the doctor.

Roxana’s illness was a before and an after in her family. “When it was my turn to get the (polio) vaccine, they didn’t do it because I was sick, I had fever and back then it was handled that children with a fever were not vaccinated. From that moment, my father made us see the importance of vaccines, it became a very important issue for everyone, especially the importance of being able to have access to medications and prevention”, she stressed.  

The doctor, with more than 20 years of laboratory experience, is today one of the most prominent vaccine specialists in Honduras and is aware of the paradox that this means in her life. “I was affected by a disease that is vaccine-preventable, and in my career and my work I had to work on the issues of vaccines. As I studied, I was able to relate to what I had experienced and compare it with scientific knowledge. How it affected the disease, what the vaccine was, then I was understanding what had caused me to be given this disability and it made me more aware of what a vaccine can prevent” she explains.

Overcoming natural and personal barriers

Roxana uses braces to walk as a consequence of her illness. At the age of 4, the church gave her mother a wheelchair, but they chose not to use it and decided that the girl would walk on crutches. “Neither she nor I at the time knew the transcendence that it was going to have in my life to use crutches. If I had depended on the chair perhaps, I would not have studied, I would have stayed in the house. Currently there are very few accessibility conditions to enter any building. Even in the Ministry of Health still to this day there is little accessibility and at that time even less so”, warns this doctor, who every day must climb several flights of stairs to reach her place of work.

And the value of effort and overcoming has been well engraved since childhood thanks to her parents, with whom she lived in the populous John F. Kennedy neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, to which she assures that, every time that she goes back to visit her father –her mother passed away in 2015– she does not want to leave.

“I have to always thank my dad that he taught me how to fight. When I was a little girl, if we were walking in the street or in the house and I fell down, he let me get back up by myself, he didn’t go running to help me, nor my siblings. No, he told me: ‘Get up by yourself’ and that’s how I learned how to pick myself up”, she remembers.

The importance of vaccines

Vaccinating your children is giving them better opportunities. I believe that no parent is going to want something bad for their children so, vaccinating them is opening the doors for them to get ahead,” she says, adding: “I consider myself lucky, I know that many of the people who contracted polio could not have that accessibility to what I had, to the facilities that I had,” she emphasizes.

This Honduran specialist highlights the “tireless” role of the Ministry of Health and the immunization program in making the population aware of the importance of vaccines to prevent diseases in babies, children, or any family member, and considered it vital to “counteract false information” and “guarantee health as a right for all.”

Roxana feels proud of being part of the country’s public health system and celebrates with hope the 30th anniversary of the polio-free Americas. And once again, she returns to the teaching of her father: “one always wants to act on an existing problem, but in health, the best that we can have is prevention.”