Measles Outbreaks are back in the United States
August 30th, 2008
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This is some very disturbing, but alas, unsurprising news. The United States has long been one of the world leaders in the development and deployment of vaccines to prevent infectious disease. In the case of measles, the US has historically been at the head of the pack for fighting the disease with preventative vaccines. However, the trend of dramatic reductions in measles, which had all but eliminated the disease by the late 1990’s has begun a dramatic reversal.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that so far this year there have been at least 131 cases of the disease, although more may not have been reported. This may not sound like a lot, but it’s actually the highest number of cases reported in over a decade and is especially disturbing given that the numbers indicate a sharp rise, potentially capable of reversing years of progress in reducing the disease. CDC officials are understandably concerned.
The recent outbreak is not unique in the type of disease or the country in question. Measels outbreaks have also occured in the UK, Germany and other countries which, in previous years, had also seen the disease become extremely rare due to vaccinations. This is also not the first time that a disease long thought to have been religated to history has reappeared in the United States. In recent years, whooping cough has made an alarming comeback with outbreaks reported in numerous US states. At first, some younger doctors were confused by the symptoms, which had not been common in the US health care system since the mid to late 1970’s.
Before the invention of the measles vaccine, the US saw 48,000 cases of the disease per year with up to 500 deaths due to complications. Thousands more suffered life-long residual effects of the disease including infertility, skin scars, hearing loss and occasionally complete deafness. The return of this and other diseases that are entirely preventable is something that should be a matter of great concern, especially given that the primary reason cited is the volentary refusal of parents to vaccinate children due to their belief that vaccines are linked to autism or that they are “unnatural” or “full of toxins” or simply unhealthy. These claims have been very well debunked on several occasions, but continue to persist.
What may be most ironic about this is that many of these diseases are beginning to be brought under control in some of the most poor and economically depressed areas of the world. Aggressive efforts by the WHO, Unicef and other groups are starting to show results. Yet these same diseases which the poorest of the world are only beginning to see relief from are becoming more common in the richest countries of the world, places where the vaccines are easily avaliable and encouraged by numerous health programs. Health officials in the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, New Zeland and elsewhere continue to fight to get their own people to accept these life-saving inoculations, yet they can barely manage to export enough to fill the need for those who line up and beg for the opertunity to be vaccinated in poorer countries.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 30th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
A girl I used to date (back in the days) had suffered permanent damage to her hearing from a bout of the measles, although she was handling it, made her life harder than it needed to be. That was many years ago, and since then I married someone else and raised two kids, but this post made me think of Isabel because the first thing that came to mind is how would her parents of felt if they knew it was because of a willful omission on their part, they had been the cause of her handicap.
I know exactly how I would feel if I had did that to one of my kids.
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August 30th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
True, but also consider that many parents feel the same way when their kid is diagnosed with autism or something and they blame themselves for vaccinating them. I know this is not the cause of it, and all the data indicates it’s hereditary and not anyone’s fault for doing or not doing something. But there are people who have made it their life’s mission to convince every parent of an autistic child that vaccination is why and recruit them to stop other parents from giving vaccines.
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August 30th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Gordon said:
I don’t think so. I suspect that they are desperately trying to lay blame on someone else. That’s a big difference from knowing that you did/or didn’t do something, as an act of will that damaged your child.
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August 31st, 2008 at 6:32 am
Today, it’s mumps and measles. Tomorrow, it could be, say, polio. Hopefully we never see it come to that.
Perhaps it’s just that fewer and fewer people alive these days have ever seen what polio or smallpox do to a person – they’ve never had to see it. Why? Thanks to vaccination. If people had seen smallpox or polio, then maybe they’d have a little more respect for the fact that vaccines represent one of the single greatest triumphs of science-based public health that humanity has ever known.
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August 31st, 2008 at 7:11 am
Luke said:
There are a number of people and groups out there who actually claim that vaccines just plain don’t work at all and are only for making money and hurting children (some kind of plot or something to destroy the next generation so that whoever in charge can retain power or whatever).
They support this by showing that diseases like polio showed a decline even before the vaccine came into use since their high in the mid 1800’s and then through a dramatic reduction in the early 20th century. They claim that it was better sanitation that stopped them.
They’re partially right in one sense, because the initial drop did occur primarily due to sanitation and also due to quarantines. Remember that before germ theory, preventing disease was entirely in the dark ages with no understanding of transmission, so the reduction before the vaccines came out was due to preventative measures like quarantines, better sanitation, a better understanding of how to handle sick individuals and the things they came into contact with, disinfectant etc.
But of course, sanitation, disinfection, quarantines and that kind of thing can only get you so far. Smallpox has not been reported in decades and polio has been eradicated from much of the world. You could never do that without vaccinations.
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August 31st, 2008 at 10:10 am
Recently we rolled out a vaccine for HPV (human paploma virus) in Australia, free for girls in schools. It is expected that this will dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, cervical cancer in our country. Thankfully it seems this has been taken up with relatively little fuss.
Vaccine doubters and AIDS deniers and similar types are in a bad science league of there own. A “psychic” parting an idiot from their money is one thing but this is totally another. especially in the case of diseases like whooping cough which can be fatal in children too young to vaccinate, but is contracted from those who are old enough, but are not vaccinated. A parent who would vaccinate there child might have to live through their newborn baby struggle and die of a horrible disease that someone else could have prevented. It’s been demonstrated with diseases like polio and small pox that we can eradicate diseases if we all work together.
I guess education and accurate information is the only way to convince people. Good on you Dr Buzz0 for bringing up such an important and disturbing issue. I’ll be sure to renew my efforts to convince doubters that vaccination is the way to go and I hope everyone else will be doing the same.
cheers.
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August 31st, 2008 at 11:00 am
Unless you were born before 1957, polio may seem to be just another ephemeral disease that has been nonexistent for years. Those born before 1957 remember having a great fear of this horrible disease which crippled thousands of once active, healthy children. This disease had no cure and no identified causes, which made it all the more terrifying. People did everything that they had done in the past to prevent the spread of disease, such as quarantining areas, but these tactics never seemed to work.
It was not until the development and distribution of the vaccine against polio that people could have a secure sense of hope that they would not fall victim to this paralyzing disease. Once this vaccine proved to be an effective cure, polio was basically wiped out. Those of you lucky enough to live in a time when vaccination is readily available never knew the terror that permeated the lives of so many just a few decades ago.
One of the leading fund raising groups of that era that pushed for and helped pay for trials of the Salk vaccine was the Mother’s March of Dimes (later shortened to The March of Dimes) where mothers all over North America when door to door collecting dimes (my own mom was one of them) and did much to keep the polio threat on the various governments front burner. It must make them want to puke to see what their granddaughters are doing now.
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August 31st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
My suggestion would be that while they are still alive, some of the individuals who have lived for the past few decades with partial paralysis, leg braces, deformities and such from the disease might make for some powerful public service messages, and I’d be surprised if such people were not more than willing to do so.
Believe it or not, there are even a few people still alive who have been on a ventilator for most of their lives due to contracting polio in the 1950’s. At least now, the modern positive pressure systems are more portable than the old iron lungs. Some of the patients only need them while they are sleeping because there are techniques for breathing with minimal diphram movement which they learn to consciously do.
Not a whole lot of people left with severe problems from polio, though. A few more years, there won’t be any.
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