U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013 462
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have announced that measles cases in the U.S. spiked this year, rising to three times their recent average rate. It's partly due to a greater number of people traveling to the U.S. when they're infectious, but also because a frustrating number of people are either failing to have their children vaccinated, or are failing to do so in a timely manner. Dr. Thomas Friedman said, 'Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.' Phil Plait adds, 'In all three of these outbreaks, someone who had not been vaccinated traveled overseas and brought the disease back with them, which then spread due to low vaccination rates in their communities. It's unclear how much religious beliefs themselves were behind the outbreaks in Brooklyn and North Carolina; it may have been due to widespread secular anti-vax beliefs in those tight-knit groups. But either way, a large proportion of the people in those areas were unvaccinated.'"
Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
.
Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anti-vaxxers (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, it sucks for the kids, but let's not pretend that the measles are fatal with the exception of a tiny fraction of cases.
Huh? Quoth wikipedia:
Between the years 1987 and 2000, the case fatality rate across the United States was 3 measles-attributable deaths per 1000 cases, or 0.3%. In underdeveloped nations with high rates of malnutrition and poor healthcare, fatality rates have been as high as 28%. In immunocompromised patients (e.g. people with AIDS) the fatality rate is approximately 30%.
Re:stop the sensationalist crap (Score:5, Informative)
Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.
Re:The really sad thing is vaccines improving (Score:5, Informative)
You could at least get your talking points from somewhere that at least updates them. Thiomersal is gone from all childhood vaccines except flu, and even then it's only in the multidose vials.
And guess what? The removal hasn't done anything to autism rates or anything else.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Informative)
Outside of their belief in Poseidon or Zeus or whatever, sure, there's plenty of smart religious people.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
Other than the simple examples (polio, smallpox, etc.) ... could you elaborate? Say, for example, the Hep. B vaccine given to infants (as in, at birth)?
Are you arguing for vaccination in general or arguing, specifically, for every single vaccination that is recommended?
It's simply not as clear as you want to believe, with reference specific vaccines. And no, I don't actually subscribe to the debunked/fraudulent vaccine-gut-autism link by Wakefield. But I have actually looked for specific data regarding specific vaccines and found them to be incredibly lacking. Or non-existent.
In the case of the Hep B vaccine, it is given to infants, and yet, according to the CDC, the way infants get Hep B:
How does a baby get Hepatitis B?
A baby can get Hepatitis B from an infected mother during childbirth.
But the infant is given the vaccine regardless of whether the mother has it. Huh. Yes, there are risks related to Hep B, but what are those risks to the infant if the mother is actually tested? Suddenly, we are narrowing it down to the risk of getting Hep B and the risks of the illness itself ... narrowing those risks down to the amount of women who are tested for Hep B and are given a false negative...
tl;dr: don't assume that people who refuse individual vaccines (1) think all vaccines are bad and (2) only research quack sites.
Doing our best to keep suicide #1 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Duh (Score:0, Informative)
Don't you know? In the U.S. crimes like "stupidity" or "poverty" are entirely genetic. It's official.
Not true. Poverty is due to laziness. Everyone could be a millionaire if they just worked hard enough. Those who are not are obviously just no-good slackers.
Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's not eradicated, and it's actually making a comeback (thanks to the anti-vaxxers).
Smallpox, It wasn't eradicated from the world (many third world countries have outbreaks), but generally in North America and Europe, the chances of contracting it were nil. It's why they started going after chickenpox as well.
Anyhow, those with a medical reason to not get vaccinated don't generally hang out with others who aren't vaccinated as well, so they get some herd immunity.
It's the likes of Jenny McCarthy and their ilk - like attracts like so you end up with whole groups who aren't immunized congregating together and regularly and who will rapidly pass disease from one to another. One person in a herd not having it is fine. A whole herd not having it means the entire herd gets it.
Last I heard, the only place you could get smallpox would be to break into one of about 7 sealed government health facilities on this planet and steal one of the preserved virus samples. Unless something very alarming happened very recently and I haven't heard about it, smallpox has been eradicated. Unless some idiot opens one of those labs and makes a biological weapon.
Maybe you mean polio.
Re:So the vaccine has a 10 % failure rate? (Score:2, Informative)
you can't conclude that it depends on the population. If the population exposed to the infection is 90 unvaccintated nutcases and 10000 sensible people. You can get 90 unvaccinated and 10 vaccinated if the failure rate is 0.1%
That is not to say that the failure rate is 0.1%. I don't know what it is but there is a failure rate and that is just another reason herd immunity is important.
Re:So the vaccine has a 10 % failure rate? (Score:5, Informative)
No, 10% of the people who were infected were also vaccinated. That doesn't mean there is a 10% failure rate in the vaccine. There are many many more people vaccinated than not vaccinated. To get the actual failure rate you would need to compute number_of_people_vaccinated_and_infected/number_of_people_vaccinated_and_exposed. With the later being very difficult to calculate.
Re:Vaccinations discriminate against middle class (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't understand why anyone would turn to insurance for predictable expenses - that's like getting car insurance that covers gas and tires. Just seems crazy to me.
While I don't love that insurance is used for predictable things, insurance companies know that people who see the doctor regularly, get the tests their doctors recommend for them and take their prescribed medication cost less to insure when the unpredictable [well, unpredictable in small numbers] happens.
So, to make sure that you cost as little as possible to insure, your insurance covers predictable expenses.
Because insurers know this, they can buy in bulk -- sending you to in-network doctors, hospitals and pharmacies at a discount over their standard fee rate, further reducing the total cost (to them) to insure you.
You could argue that your premium should be lower, and you should perhaps be required to comply with doctors orders, but I'm pretty sure we know how that'd turn out.
Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Acutally, it *is* eradicated in the wild. The last documented case of naturally occuring smallpox was in 1977. WHO officially declared it eradicated in 1979. You may be confusing it with polio, which they're still trying to chase down and eliminate the last pockets of.
Re: Duh (Score:5, Informative)
With effective modern medical care, the death rate from measles is about 0.1%. If proper care is not given, it can be as high as 10%. Just prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in the USA, approximately 450 people died each year of the disease, and 48,000 had complications severe enough to require hospitalization.
Re: Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, I've had like 5 diseases (measles, mumps, varicella, rubella and influenzaa) as a child...and I'm still alive and quite healthy with ZERO side effects of having had those diseases.
Do you know you've had zero side effects? My dad's heard valve was damaged by measles (no vaccine when he was a kid) and he didn't know until he was in his 50s and it stopped functioning properly.
In any case I've ridden in cars and jet aircraft without seat belts and am still around but that doesn't mean I don't use them when they've available.
Big pharma marketing has apparently been successful in creating a nation of hypochondriacs.
Actually vaccines aren't big moneymakers and in in fact stopped being produced at all in the US until Congress stepped in [hrsa.gov].
Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's not eradicated, and it's actually making a comeback (thanks to the anti-vaxxers).
You're mistaken. No known human has contracted any form of naturally-occurring smallpox (i.e. not laboratory grown) since 1977 [pbs.org] -- and we actually know the first and last name of the last person who ever did.
You're probably thinking of some other disease. There are lots of them; smallpox is the only one we've ever gotten rid of.
I doubt it (Score:5, Informative)
40-60% is total childhood mortality in primitive societies. Most of the reduction in childhood mortality since then is probably due to better sanitation, better treatment of diarrhea, and the use of antibiotics, not vaccinations.
Depends... (Score:5, Informative)
When comparing modern mortality improvement over the older pre-industrial, pre-modern-medicine regimes, the "most helpful" reductions vary with the age group you're dealing with:
Overall, clean water and sanitation probably win as the single most important advancement in public health, ever, but vaccines are a *very* strong second. Frankly, drugs are at best a distant fourth, behind even improved medical understanding of the human body (enabling more effective trauma and non-drug treatments of common diseases and accidents). Drug improvements really have helped two big categories of people: soldiers at war, and the elderly.
-Erik
Re: Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Duh (Score:4, Informative)
The vaccines are better. The problem with Chicken Pox is that it never really fully dies. It just goes dormant in the nerves. At some point it can come back in the form of shingles in adults. The vaccine is not a live virus that can replicate in people, so it doesn't infect them.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Informative)
How does a baby get Hepatitis B?
From other babies. Those of us who've had them know from experience that "bodily fluids" get exchanged in lots of ways that don't involve sex or needles.
A friend's father (60-something) has chronic HepB, undoubtedly from a childhood infection. Fortunately, she doesn't -- but his liver is mostly gone, to the extent that she was considering donating a lobe of hers.