Uptick In Whooping Cough Linked To Subpar Vaccines 273
sciencehabit writes "Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study (abstract) confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don't offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do."
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Well of course they aren't. That's why we still have 10% of the population dying from smallpox and polio ... right?
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Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I guess that would explain all these horrible outbreaks of polio, mumps, and measles we've been having....
Oh, wait, we aren't having large outbreaks of these diseases? Well, then I guess vaccines work.
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you have proof the DNA of the disease is the same then as now?
they might have that proof, actually.
but more than that they have the last years stats of the people who were vaccinated 20+ years ago. presumably the change didn't happen overnight either so there would be some overlap there as well where some age group got either one.
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Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
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Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I suggest you try thinking harder next time.
Smallpox would still be around if they didn't work, and other diseases would be much more common.
I'm Mr. Darwin - what's up? (Score:5, Insightful)
With population exploding, shouldn't we return to an era where the weak were culled out?...
Unless you live in Africa, population is not exploding. The population growth rate is slowing, the UN predicts that the world population will stabilize around 2090 and fall afterwards. Most (more recent) predictions think that this estimate is pessimistic - it's looking like population will stabilize around 2050 and decline afterwards.
Most industrialized nations have negative population growth already, the US *would* have negative population growth if you discount immigration. Even with immigration, the US population is slowing and will turn the corner sometime in the next couple of decades.
... back in the day old people had the grace to die of diabetes or a heart attack, now they live until 90, but don't work the last 30 years of their lives, effectively eating the seed corn of the new generation.
I think the problems you are seeing is due to a lack of an evolved sense of morality. On your part.
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Our "ability to adapt as a species" would mean simply letting people die if they weren't already immune. Unless you're aware of some Lamarkian pressure I don't know about.
Use of vaccines does create a selective pressure for vaccines to adapt, which is why they're used for the most dangerous diseases or in the most at-risk groups, or so broadly that a disease doesn't have a chance to adapt before it loses all of its possible niches. Adios, smallpox. Time to get your coat, polio.
Re:The problem with vaccines (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is those older vaccines probably hurt lots people. Which is not to say that they did not help millions more. Its not just the era of litigation that is the issue. We are a lot better at identifying the cause of health problems now than we were 40 years ago. We have gotten much faster and widely distributed news, so even a handful of bad outcomes becomes know to the public.
I suspect the anit-vaccs movement would be stronger not weaker if the older vaccs were still in use. A few negative outcomes with very clear established causation would be impossible to make go away in terms of news cycle.
What society is not good at is risk assessment. People are afraid to get their kid vaccinated due to the tiny risk they have some rare as yet unknown immune condition that could cause problems, but were willing to subject them to the risk of driving to the physicians office. These are the same people that demand the TSA strip search their fellow passengers but think nothing of the danger of keeping a large crowd of people confined to a small area.
We need to get much better at teaching cost benefit analysis with regard to risk management. Because right now a whole lot of people are spending a whole lot of money to make themselves less safe.
Prosiner's dilemma (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you get your children vaccinated?
It's much more likely that your child will have a bad reaction to the vaccine than to actually get the disease. And if everyone *else* gets vaccinated, there's no need for any specific child to take that risk. That's the dilemma facing parents nowadays - from their individual viewpoint, there's a higher risk from the vaccination than there is from the disease.
Taking polio (about 30 years ago) as an example, the chance of getting polio from the vaccine was about 1 in 750,000. Polio became largely non-existent in the US during the later years of the vaccination program, so individually it's easy to see why parents might not want to take the risk.
And yet if everyone makes the best choice for their personal welfare, polio runs rampant in the country with 35,000 cases per year.
This is a variant of the Prisoner's dilemma, where if everyone does what's in their immediate best interest then everyone suffers needlessly.
We must accept the fact that sometimes we forced to take risks, and sometimes those risks will go badly. The risks are structured such that by taking the forced risk we are lowering everyone's total risk, and in the case of diseases, lowering it to a point where eventually no one will have to take the risk in the future.
Re:The problem with vaccines (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is too much conspiracy thinking.
If the majority says it is good, and there is one wacko saying that it isn't. That wacko gets far more attention then the masses because, we have been trained to think everything is a conspiracy.
Not directly but we are being taught to be wary of forces that will make us the next Communist or Nazi state. Seeing how the generations before us fell into this evil mindset and just allowed to be taken over by the government.
We are now vigilant, too vigilant, every thing that comes across our plate saying trust us, this is good for you, we take it as skepticism, and most of us are not willing to do the actual science to prove it for themselves. So they don't believe the mass combined with being too lazy to check it out for themselves, creates these problems.
We want people to tell us what is best, but we don't believe these people because those same people could be lying to us to manipulate us.
Re:The problem with vaccines (Score:3, Insightful)
Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.
I know that makes a great right-wing talking point, but in fact vaccine makers are shielded from almost all liability, barring gross misconduct.
Congress created the vaccine court that evaluates people who may have been injured by a vaccination (no action is 100% free of side effects in 100% of people 100% of the time, including taking no action which in the case of the target diseases is millions of deaths and maimings or stuff like allergic reactions in the case of giving vaccines).
If you are injured by a vaccination, the vaccine court awards compensation, up to and including lifetime medical care if needed.
Part of the reason these diseases are coming back is the anti-vaccination conspiracy nut jobs. If herd immunity drops below a certain percentage then the disease can persist and grow. Above that line and you have essentially 100% protection even though some people can't or won't get the vaccine (and some people who do don't develop perfect immunity). Unfortunately so many people are willing to but "JUST ASKING QUESTIONS" and "TEACH THE CONTROVERSY" bullshit that we are below the herd immunity line for some diseases. We can look forward to a lot more dead and crippled kids before Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield's body counts are tallied.
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Please don't confuse vaccines with medication (antibiotics). There is plenty of evidence that antibiotic use leads to resistance. There is plenty of evidence that vaccine overuse leads to less disease, and extinction of the pathogen. Completely different situations. Completely different conditions. Completely different theories. There is nothing they have in common. Don't worry. Common mistake.
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Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
This.
From the article (emphasis mine):
During the 1980s, U.S. parents successfully sued manufacturers, alleging that the whole-cell vaccine also caused long-term brain damage. A 1991 Institute of Medicine report concluded that this was unproven, but by then many pertussis vaccine manufacturers had withdrawn from the market, leading Congress to create a federal vaccine injury compensation program for families who could show a strong case for vaccine damage.
Sound familiar?
One of the first areas in the US hit by a modern pertussis outbreak was here in California. It wasn't among poor people who couldn't afford the vaccine, like you might expect in emergent epidemics. Instead, it was in Marin County, home of highly affluent post-hippy folks like (say) George Lucas. These folks have been reading all of the holistic alternative medicine literature for years and have convinced themselves that every single article is another threat to the precious, precious unborn babies that they plan to have spring from their middle-aged wombs, and so huge numbers of them have decided to stop vaccinating altogether. Shock, horror, when the result is a resurgence of a disease that had been all but unseen in the area for decades, and a couple of those precious babies actually die.
You see the same thing all over the world. In France, there's some kind of conspiracy theory going around that the measles vaccine is bad. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases around. In 2011, there were 118 cases of measles in the entire United States in the first five months; in France, which has only about twice the population of California, there were 17,000.
On the positive side, people, including childless adults, can help to stop the spread of pertussis by getting a booster vaccination, which helps to increase herd immunity. If you catch whooping cough as an adult, you won't die, you'll get a very lousy respiratory illness for a while. But if you don't catch pertussis, you can't spread it to people who are more vulnerable, like children and the elderly. Right now, doctors believe you need a booster about once in your adult life. It's easy to get -- you can get it bundled with your tetanus vaccine, which if you're smart, you're getting every 10 years or so anyway. Last time I got a tetanus shot, I got the pertussis booster with it, and there was no change in price (i.e. both were fully covered by insurance).
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From what I see all the denial is coming from one side. Doctors and scientists have never said that vaccines are 100% effective or that they are 100% safe. Like all medication, there are risks and side effects. For the vast majority of people, the side effects are rare and not serious. There is a large database to keep track of side effects and a special vaccine court [wikipedia.org] set up to hear cases of side effects. The court was started to bypass the lengthy trials that normally is associated with a civil suit and is a no-fault system. However in the case of autism, the court (and science) has found no credible link. The initial claim of a link has been discredited due to fraud. Even the study that first suggested a link has been retracted due to this fraud.
Re:The problem with vaccines (Score:4, Insightful)
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No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.
Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome [wikipedia.org] that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.
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in the past 100 years expeted lifespan has jumped 30+ years in the western world.
our quality of life, relatively disease free, was previously unknown. it's still unknown in the parts of the world where they cant get vaccines.
100 years ago being crippled by polio was so common one of our greatest presidents was one such victim.
100 years ago becoming deaf from mumps was common; how many deaf kids do you see today? ya. almost none.
we live longer and better. and vaccines are a huge part of that.
if you want to think differently, i suggest you google smallpox, or visit pakistan or northern india where they still have polio cases.
look at old history photos of what disease wards used to look like, the myriad different diseases and the pain and sufferign caused by them.
or just look at the number of measles (one of hte msot contagious diseases in human history; a person with measles walks through a room, that room remains contagious for 4 hours afterward) cases in our own country. prior to the vaccine in the mid 60's there were >500K cases every year. Within 5 years it dropped to fewer than 100 cases per year. It's been declared effectively eliminated in our country and the rest of the western world.
the people who think vaccines are bad, or overrated, have no clue what they are talking about, and would be shocked to death by the difference between todays world and that of just 100 years, and the amount of disease and suffering that people had to put up with.
TLDR: you're an idiot. vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of mankind.
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I went to a conference on vaccines several years ago where somebody gave a talk on whooping cough vaccine. He said that there was a problem with the vaccine made from the whole bacterial cell, and it did have a small number of adverse effects, not as bad as whooping cough itself but more common than the other standard vaccines. At that time they were working on a new acellular vaccine, which wouldn't have as many or as serious adverse effects.
Now they have it. That's the tradeoff. Fewer adverse effects but less effectiveness.
None of this is unproven. It's well proven. You can look it up in the textbooks.
If we didn't have so much resistance to vaccines in general, they could have gotten away with a more effective vaccine that had more common adverse effects. It would have been less comfortable but with fewer deaths.
Re:The problem with vaccines (Score:3, Insightful)
The bigger problem with conspiracies is that nothing gets done about them. Whether it is some guy on the corner raving about alien abduction, a bunch of bankers illegally repossessing homes, or a sheriff supporting his local rape gang/football team, the outcome is the some. Nothing.
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And, unfortunately, this means they become a victim of their own success. People today (and I include myself in this) don't remember when polio or measles or smallpox ran rampant. They don't remember the fear of catching one of these or how serious it is. I've read enough accounts so that I understand intellectually, but I'll never know in a "living it day to day" way. Something for which I'm extremely thankful.
Sadly, some people, in ignorance, assume that these diseases were "basically like colds." You get the measles, stay home for a few days until the bumps disappear and you're good to go. They ignore all of the death or life-long disabilities these diseases brought with them. Next, they buy into the "vaccines are so risky" crowd's talk (vaccines have "toxins" in them. [scary voice]TOOOOOXXXXIIIINNNNNNSSSS!!!!!!{/scary voice]) and mentally increase the risk of the vaccines.
The end result is that these people decide not to vaccinate because they see the vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases when the reality is the exact opposite. In such a big way, mind you, that saying "the exact opposite" still feels like an understatement. And when large groups of these people make these faulty risk assessments, they increase the risk of not only them and their children, but of people who can't be vaccinated for valid reasons (too young, immune system issues, allergies, etc.).
I guarantee you that almost none of these anti-vax folks would be complaining about the MMR if measles was as rampant today as it was before the vaccine was introduced. The ones that would still be complaining would be shouted down by the crowds flocking to get the MMR.