Another Old Scourge Rising
ABC News reports on another old childhood scourge that is rising again in the United States. A disease that should have been eliminated is back, just in time for summer camp season. Measles is back with a vengeance.
After someone with measles coughs or sneezes, the virus lingers for up to two hours after that person walks away.
"The thing about measles is that it's extremely contagious," said Anne Schuchat, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. "Somebody could get measles without ever having been in the office at the same time as the first child."
The CDC Thursday announced a series of measles outbreaks between January and April 25 that resulted in 64 measles cases in the United States — the highest number reported in the same time period since 2001. Officials blame a spike in the number of travelers bringing measles in from Israel and Europe. Once in the United States, measles has been able to take hold because more and more people are choosing not to get vaccinated, Schuchat said.
Eleven of the U.S. residents who contracted measles were between the ages of 5 and 19 years old.
"My suggestion would be that summer camps oblige all foreign students to be immunized," said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University's School of Medicine in Tennessee.
Several outbreaks of mumps have occurred in the past few years as well. This is a direct result of people refusing to have their children immunized. Measles is not a trivial disease. It is estimated that some 200 million people have died in the past 150 years as a result of complications from the disease. (It should be pointed out that the death rate in developed countries is low, however.) But complications are most common - and much worse - among adults who catch the disease.
By failing to vaccinate your children or yourself, you are endangering other people.
By curtis kreutzberg, Saturday, 3 May , 2008 @ 4:52 pm
Not only do these poor kids have to eat Whole Foods overpriced crap, their trust fund parents are making them sick. How long until polio makes a comeback?
By TKelso, Saturday, 3 May , 2008 @ 8:21 pm
Thanks for posting this topic, Gaius. It’s something that needs a lot of exposure (no pun intended). A lot of shallow-minded, pseudo-intellectual parents are playing with their children’s lives for lack of anything else to do. There is no "link" between thimerisol-preserved vaccines and autism–it’s a fiction–and the medical risks of not vaccinating far outweigh the risks of vaccinating. Echoing Curtis; when and where will the measles, mumps, or polio outbreak happen that finally exposes these frauds (including that paragon of virtue RFK Jr.) for what they are?…cynical hucksters who leverage fear for personal power.
By rightwingprof, Sunday, 4 May , 2008 @ 4:57 am
It seems like we were vaccinated (definitely were against polio and smallpox — one thing I’ll never forget is the smallpox vaccination), except that when we were kids, everybody got the "standard" childhood diseases: measles, German measles, chickenpox, and mumps. So maybe we were pre-vaccine for these.
By Gaius, Sunday, 4 May , 2008 @ 5:47 am
The measles vaccine became available in 1963. I believe I had already had it by then. But I know I had the MMR vaccine later as an adult because I had not had mumps.
By Charles D Quarles, Sunday, 4 May , 2008 @ 2:41 pm
There were only two vaccines required for school entry when I started, and both were given to us at school: polio (which has nearly been eradicated) and smallpox (which has been eradicated). I remember catching both measles and chicken pox in the same year, 1964. I caught chicken pox in the summer before school started, and measles in the winter just as the fall term ended. There were epidemics of all of these viral illesses every year I went to school until I was in high school. We still had epidemics of strep and strep related illnesses as well as influenza epidemics.
I have seen a case of tetanus. It is not pretty even if the death rate is less than the typical 33% it used to be before ICUs. Infectious diseases and trauma (both intentional and accidental) are top ten causes of death each year. What most people do not realize is that only modern food handling, sanitation, and the economic shift away from primary economic production to capital goods and services have made chronic illnesses, aka the diseases of long life, more common percentage wise than they used to be.
Medical profesionals deal with common things best, precisely because they are common. Uncommon things get shunted aside precisely because they are uncommon (there’s an aphorism for this phenomenon: If you hear hoof beats (in the US), think horses, not zebras). Most primary care medical professionals have not seen these illnesses in real life and would be stumped on presentation until someone or something prompts consideration of uncommon infectious diseases. Even in the teaching institutions, only the newest members of the profession have the time to consider and research the ‘zebras’ of the medical world. Once they move on to the real world, most will never see a case and the knowledge will be buried or forgotten.