In Calif. Study, Most Kids With Whooping Cough Were Fully Vaccinated 293
An anonymous reader writes with this extract from a Reuters article: "In early 2010, a spike in cases appeared at Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, and it was soon determined to be an outbreak of whooping cough — the largest seen in California in more than 50 years. Witt had expected to see the illnesses center around unvaccinated kids, knowing they are more vulnerable to the disease. 'We started dissecting the data. What was very surprising was the majority of cases were in fully vaccinated children. That's what started catching our attention,' said Witt."
Here we go (Score:1, Insightful)
The tinfoil hat crowd is probably pleased by this. Now they can invite kids with whooping cough to their chicken pox parties.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
There's also the possible effect of non-vaccinated kids lowering the herd immunity. Basically increasing the chances of those who got the vaccine which for some reason or another wasn't effective in immunizing them to come in contact with the virus.
Like you said, lots of variables, more study needed. We do need to verify the effectiveness of the vaccine (or even the effectiveness of a particular batch of the vaccine) is not being compromised.
Re:So... The vaccine did work. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the vaccine worked. The reason most of the children who got infected also had the vaccines, was that 81% of all children had recieved the vaccine. The risk of getting the infection was still greater for the children who newer got the vaccine.
So the correct headline would be "Vaccine not as effective as previously thought".
I doubt it's the vaccine (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame the unvaccinated kids (Score:1, Insightful)
If you had your kids vaccinated before they were able to discuss it with you, you believe in forcing people to take shots.
Perhaps not ALL people. Just the ones you think are incapable of making a good decision on their own. In which case, that's not so different than anyone else.
Re:Blame the unvaccinated kids (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider: Allowing them to choose to be unvaccinated significantly increases the risk for you and your children.
Diseases like this only vanish when everyone is vaccinated, otherwise local outbreaks can still spread from the unvaccinated into the general population.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we will generalize it to "vaccines don't always work".
Then you're not "most people".
Re:Blame the unvaccinated kids (Score:4, Insightful)
That's called parenting. Until your kids reach the age of majority or are otherwise emancipated, you have to make these decisions for them. You're legally obligated to do so, in fact.
Dead bass ackwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you think shingles came from before there was a CP vaccine? "Shingles" is the reactivation of the same freaking virus you had long ago -- because herpes is forever.
The vaccine, unlike the wild virus, does not take up residence in nerve roots and does not have the potential to cause shingles later. However, both the wild immunity and the vaccine immunity wane with age, so if you're not routinely exposed to the wild virus you need a booster to prevent shingles.
Which, thank you, I will be getting along with my pertussis booster in about two years. Both I and my (now adult) children have had the wild flavor of chicken pox, and I can do without another round with it. Unlike some, I can read the medical literature on this stuff. I even talk to my doctor, believe it or not.
Now, get off my lawn.
Re:Here we go (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal choice only goes so far. If your personal choice puts my family at risk, then it ceases to become a personal choice. You do realize that there is a compromise between "ALL HAIL THE GOVERNMENT OVERLORD" and "FUCK THE FED", right?
Perhaps vaccinations aren't bad? If they're properly researched and proved effective, they might even be good?
Re:Here we go (Score:4, Insightful)
"Most times once you get Cpox as a kid, your immune for life, and if you do get it a second time it's much milder."
I wonder if anyone informed you of shingles? cPox parties seem to not mention that for some reason.
Glad you did the right thing.
You son probable got it because some other ass wipe made the wrong decision and didn't have their kids vaccinated.
You don't understand vaccines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointing out the inevitable consequences of not vaccinating isn't "bashing".
Not everyone can be vaccinated, and many (such as the elderly) don't develop a strong immunity when vaccinated. For example, in my son's kindergarten class, there's a kid who have to have a liver transplant, and hence is on immunosuppressive drugs. Having my kids vaccinated helps protect that kid's life.
You don't understand how vaccines work.
They expose the adaptive immune system to the virus/bacterium in question. The adaptive immune system develops (in a pretty much evolutionary way) a response. It's unique to every individual - no two people produce the same antibodies. Some of them are more effective than others (hence the differing strength of immunity people display after being vaccinated, and why some rare people get really lucky and develop robust immune responses even to outliers like HIV [scienceagogo.com]) but there's such a variety that disease organisms can't "evolve immunity" in the way you're talking about.
Some fast-mutating viruses - like the flu, or even more, the cold viruses - can change enough to require new vaccines periodically, sure. But (a) that's not 'evolving immunity to a vaccine' and (b) the old vaccine remains just as effective against the old variants.
Re:Dead bass ackwards (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was herd immunity, you would still expect to see a significantly higher number of infected amongst the unvaccinated.
That's not necessarily true.
Say the vaccine is 96% effective and we're studying a population of 1000 kids. If they were all vaccinated, and they all come in contact with the virus, you'd expect roughly 40 of them to still get sick. If 30 of those do not get vaccinated, and all 1000 were exposed to the virus, you'd have a cap of 30 non-vaccinated kids getting sick, but still roughly 39 of the vaccinated kids will be sick, simply because there are more of them.
The total amount of people with the disease goes up significantly, but most of the people coming down with the disease are still people who were vaccinated. If you stop assuming all those people came in contact with the virus, the fact that there are now 30 kids who weren't vaccinated increases the chance of 39 kids for whom the vaccine didn't work to come in contact with the disease, so there's a larger proportion of vaccinated kids getting sick.
Re:Here we go (Score:4, Insightful)
You are using hyperbole to state your case. That is rarely an effective conversational tool (although I do love it, and regularly use it).
There is always compromise. I am a firm believer in the 2nd amendment. I personally own several firearms, and am an avid hunter. I also firmly believe in concealed carry laws. What I don’t believe in is that any idiot should be allowed to own and carry a firearm without training. There should be a strict licensing procedure, training series, and background check (kind of like the ones we currently have in most states). To conceal carry, YES, you should have to register. If I am a cop, and I’m pulling you over, I don’t want a gun to surprise me. What if I try to grab that gun, because it surprised me, and it harms you or myself? Who is at fault there? I was protecting myself in a shitty situation (in my head) you were simply exercising your right.
It's not always black and white, anonymous internet person called wisnoskil. Most of life is shades of gray. I do not have the solutions, you are correct there. BUT, I'm not willing to discount immunizations because of a random article that says that maybe this immunization isn't going to last as long as we previously thought, and therefore we need to re-evaluate our SPACING IN TIME that the shots happen.
In other words, please don't leap to conclusions that aren't stated. Again, my original post simply called for compromise and rational thought.
Doctors (Score:0, Insightful)
I hope you noticed that the researchers behind this study are doctors too.
Not all doctors buy into the status quo (where medication trumps diet and lifestyle, and doctors merely follow rules and guidelines instead of thinking for themselves). Remember what actually determines the status quo (political power, not independent research).
Did you know that coronary artery disease (for example) is nearly 100% attributed to diet, specifically the exponential rise in meat and dairy consumption over the past century? All doctors know that diet is a factor, but nearly all believe that medication is the answer (and hardly any could tell you that the average American today eats orders of magnitude more meat/dairy as the average American 100 years ago. But there have been very reputable studies that have shown the exact opposite of what most doctors believe -- that the answer is diet. Of course, adjusting one's diet doesn't generate any revenue for the health care industry.
Re:Here we go (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I understand adjuvants are used so that less viral material is needed. Why not use more viral material and eliminate adjuvants? Is this feasible? How much more cost would it add for the vaccine manufacturer?
Today, there is a significant disagreement on how to improve vaccince safety. One large camp advocates the use of acellular approach (using non-living chemical compounds) that the immune system can learn on to attack the real virus, instead of having dead viral material. The reason for going to the acellular approach is that it is deemed safer, and easier to manage quality control (e.g., effectiveness from batch to batch, odds of residual live active virus contaminatio). Unfortunatly, our immune systems aren't trained as well on this acellular bootstrapping immunity boost technique and the reasnon appears to be that it is "too-clean". This "too-clean" effects was initially found in early standard vaccine production: researching why some batches were more effective than others, they found the batches with fewer contaminants actually produced a weaker immune response. You might think of it as an analogy to the immune system having "book" knowledge or "real-world" knowedge of how to do something (okay, maybe that's a poor analogy). Or having some extra "dirt" helps build the immunity.
To combat this, the adjuvants are added which amp-up the immune response. This allows for more control of effectiveness across batches (rather trying to control the contamination levels to small, but non-zero amounts) and this makes the production costs lower for virus based vaccines and is probably required to make acellular vaccines as effective as dead-virus vaccines.
The WHO (world health organization) and the makers of acellular vaccine technology are the biggest advocates of adjuvants as it allows for cheaper vaccines to be made. So the right question to ask is not how much cost it would add for the vaccine manufacturer, but how much cost it would add to vaccination programs administered by the WHO? and how those economics that affect what is available on the market? (vaccine makers don't want to trial too many variants, so if a big customer wants something one way, the rest of the market pretty much has to live with their choice).
Of course there is still the problem of quick response production (like flu vaccines). Sometimes there isn't enough wall clock time to even mass produce the viral material you need (this happened in the H1N1 epidemic, but in other cases, certain strains of viruses were found to be hard to culture in eggs). So in these situations, you have a choice: Innoculate fewer folks, or spread out the viral material that you do have and augment the immune response with adjuvants. Of course for H1N1, we know now that they did the latter in many cases (and in all the acellular production it was pretty much required anyhow).