Vintage Diseases Making a Comeback

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has a piece on a recent resurgence in some old-timey diseases. Mumps, Whooping Cough, and Rickets are making a comeback, back in style like it's 1955." From the article: "Public-health officials certainly weren't expecting to get 'bitten' by mumps this year. Although the virus has been circulating in British kids since 2000, it hadn't caused much trouble in the United States since an outbreak in Kansas 18 years ago. The Midwest is the epicenter again, but the victims are primarily college students, not children. Once a childhood disease, the virus has now taken hold in university towns. That's partly because crowded dorms and cafeterias are breeding grounds for germs that are spread by sneezing and coughing."

Comments

Re:Wait, whatever happened to MMR?

[RobertLTux]

the big problem is what happens if a bug somehow (RC or ID) gets a mutation to
1 blank the vacciene (like we know the flu bug does)
2 increases the inucubation period
3 ramps the bug to LETHAL
4 includes the "airborne vector"

Re:Innoculations?

[bcmm]

Pressed submit too soon...

A population is considered protected if greater than a certain percentage of people are immune, because beyond that point an outbreak will tend to die out as people get better faster than others are infected. If the vaccine fails in 10% of people, it shouldn't really matter. However, worries (and tabloid scares) about side effects lead to too many people refusing the vaccine, which starts to put a lot of people in danger.

Scare story of the month...

[evilviper]

I guess we're getting this story now because people wised-up about "Bird Flu". Which, of course, was the successor to the short-lived "Super Volcanos" scare, which was itself the successor to the "World-ending Asteroid" scare story.

It's not that the stories themselves are complete nonsense, it's the way that they are handled. It's as if each one is the focus of world attention for a few weeks, then COMPLETELY disappearing when the ratings drop. Then a short intermission, and the next one comes along with more hype than the last.

I sure am glad that asteroids and bird flu aren't a threat anymore (who fixed them, BTW?), and I can focus on being scared by this new thing.

And to actually learn something...

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Go and look up at actual statistics that directly correlate measured health with ethnicity in the USA, and you will find that Mexican immigrants are actually healthier than the population at large. (And note that this is the New Republic I'm citing here.)

What does your claim tell us? That you don't care to look at actual facts. You have your set of preconceptions, and are on the lookout for facts that confirm it.

Re:A number of issues

[fermion]

pretty much these all boil down to the fact that we are at two generation that have no experience with the deadly impliciation of these childhood illnesses. I suspect that very few people even have a grandparent that has been striken by polio of mumps or cholera.

It is not that we, at least in the US, do not try to immunize everyone. Every child who attends school must be immunized. No exceptions. I do not believe that health providers, unless the fucked up congress has done something lately, need to ask about anything before giving a shot. These shots are so critical to our public health that we ought to just be giving them away for free to every child. I mean the cost of the shot versus the cost of treating the illness and all. There is no reason to track kids. Just make sure they have shots before putting them in closed groups. Colleges should do the same.

Again, the issue is people not understanding the security implications. Before vaccine, the number of cases and deaths were measured in thousands every year. Two generations ago Polio paralyzed at least 20,000 people per year, and now we are worried about a few hundrend with autism allegedly caused by the vaccine? Would these kids have been strong enough to survive without the vacine anyway? Sure we should make it as safe as possible, but get some perspective. In the case of mumps, there were a few hundred thousand people a years that got mumps, and perhaps a hundred died. Now the number of cases are a few thousand, with perhaps no one dies. Which world do you want to live in? It is like all thes fanatics wanting a simpler world, but who many woulg give up the air conditioning, car, fast food, non-wood stove, or TV?

I am sure that the left and right wing wackos will be the first to complain when an outbreak occurs, but it will be their fault. There is no absolute security, but vaccines has certainly seem to make the world an overall safer place. Whether it is good to have children who would have died under normal circumstances live is up for debate, but what is not is that vaccines seem to help us all.

On a last note, in this case it may be that the virus has outgrown the vaccine, and certainly the overuse of antibiotics and anti-viral agents, especially hand sanitizer, will help create a supervirus that could destroy us all. But vaccines are not there to kiil the virus, just to prepare our bodies for the eventual attack.