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In Calif. Study, Most Kids With Whooping Cough Were Fully Vaccinated
An anonymous reader writes with this extract from a Reuters article: "In early 2010, a spike in cases appeared at Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, and it was soon determined to be an outbreak of whooping cough — the largest seen in California in more than 50 years. Witt had expected to see the illnesses center around unvaccinated kids, knowing they are more vulnerable to the disease. 'We started dissecting the data. What was very surprising was the majority of cases were in fully vaccinated children. That's what started catching our attention,' said Witt."
The tinfoil hat crowd is probably pleased by this. Now they can invite kids with whooping cough to their chicken pox parties.
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
If the kids who weren't vaccinated acted as cultures to create a lot more whooping cough bacteria then that might allow more diversity which in turn may more easily create strains resistant to the normal vaccination.
Hm. Better not vaccinate my kid then, since he's more likely to get whooping cough if he's fully vaccinated.
...five times. Aside from having it when she was a child, during every one of her four pregnancies a test that suggested she still needed the vaccination and she was given it again.
Surely the fifth time was the charm.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Vaccines aren't perfect, and with pertussis it's important to get them vaccinated as soon as most of them can mount an effective response. So if enough kids are vaccinated, the odds that the ones who do come down with it are vaccinated becomes greater than that they're unvaccinated.
All in all a pretty basic exercise in high-school probability algebra.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
No, the vaccine worked. The reason most of the children who got infected also had the vaccines, was that 81% of all children had recieved the vaccine. The risk of getting the infection was still greater for the children who newer got the vaccine.
So the correct headline would be "Vaccine not as effective as previously thought".
Let's put it this way. When you have a vaccine that works 95% of the time, and 99% of the kids are vaccinated. You'll have ~5% of the population contracting the disease despite being vaccinated. And the 1% of the population will contract the disease because they weren't vaccinated. You end with way more students that are vaccinated with the disease than those who are not vaccinated (absolute number wise). But it also ignored the fact that 94% of the population was protected against the disease.
If you had your kids vaccinated before they were able to discuss it with you, you believe in forcing people to take shots.
Perhaps not ALL people. Just the ones you think are incapable of making a good decision on their own. In which case, that's not so different than anyone else.
This actually makes perfect sense. Consider the following:
1. Most children -are- vaccinated.
2. Vaccinations do not really make you "immune" to catching a disease, they train your body to more efficiently fight it off.
So, what happens is that the small percentage on unvaccinated children are bringing Whooping Cough back into contact with the rest of us, and those vaccinated children who perhaps don't have their immune system running at full capacity (tired, stress, fighting other illnesses, etc) catch it. Since there are statistically so many more of the latter available, it makes perfect sense that there are more cases in vaccinated children than unvaccinated.
A more interesting statistic would be if every outbreak could be traced back to an unvaccinated "patient zero". I strongly suspect this is the case.
I have kids -- and I *DO* vaccinate them.
I, however, have suffered massive reactions to vaccines in the past and now refuse them. The worst was a HepC which knocked me on my arse for a month. Never finished the full course of that vaccine.
This is not necessarily unusual. Vaccines are not 100% effective. Having the vaccine administered to you is not a 100% guarantee of immunity!
We know this, and we've always known this. It's one of the very important reasons that you must vaccinate as many people as possible.
Vaccinations require a population-wide threshold to prevent the spread of disease. This group, along with those that cannot be vacinated (Weak immune systems, the very young) Count against that threshold. That is why it is critical that all that are able to be vaccinated be vaccinated. That is why anti-vac morons are dangerous to themselves and those around them.
Consider: Allowing them to choose to be unvaccinated significantly increases the risk for you and your children.
Diseases like this only vanish when everyone is vaccinated, otherwise local outbreaks can still spread from the unvaccinated into the general population.
That's called parenting. Until your kids reach the age of majority or are otherwise emancipated, you have to make these decisions for them. You're legally obligated to do so, in fact.
The previous effectiveness was assumed to be 20 years, but it seems closer to 5-10. That is one reason that most colleges require proof of the 12 year booster (which is often given at age 18 since an incoming freshman needs it to start attending but most parents skip it in adolescence.)
I caught whooping cough when I was 25 because I had not had the booster since I was 12. I was also required to get a fresh TDaP at age 31 to start attending graduate school, again because the booster was assumed to wear off after 20 years.
Perhaps they need to change the booster recommendations from every 20 years to every 10 years.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Really? You have no problem with murder? You don't want "The Man" saying you have to drive on the right side of the road or stop for red lights?
I'm sorry, but until you can have a planet all to yourself, complete freedom is a fantasy.
It is known the shot wears off, it is know that a booster at 13 should be done, and again in adults.
There is no surprise here.
The headline should read:
"Study shows CDC correct. Booster should be given at 11, and not 13.'
""The longer you went from your last vaccine, the greater your risk of disease," Witt told Reuters Health."
Oh really? How is an infectious disease Doc not already aware of this? I'm am not a Dr, but I have spent 12 years reading vaccine studies and even I am aware of that fact.
I hope it's just a poor aticle, and this Dr. Wit just wasn't quoted in the correct context.
Based on every other article about science, that's probably the case.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Where do you think shingles came from before there was a CP vaccine? "Shingles" is the reactivation of the same freaking virus you had long ago -- because herpes is forever.
The vaccine, unlike the wild virus, does not take up residence in nerve roots and does not have the potential to cause shingles later. However, both the wild immunity and the vaccine immunity wane with age, so if you're not routinely exposed to the wild virus you need a booster to prevent shingles.
Which, thank you, I will be getting along with my pertussis booster in about two years. Both I and my (now adult) children have had the wild flavor of chicken pox, and I can do without another round with it. Unlike some, I can read the medical literature on this stuff. I even talk to my doctor, believe it or not.
Now, get off my lawn.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We're here at Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, where we've secretly replaced the fine vaccines they usually serve with Folgers Crystals. Let's see if anyone can tell the difference!
Unfortunately the Autism vaccine causes Whooping Cough. I read it in a scientician paper.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How about forcing people to get a basic education?
No vaccine is 100% effective, so some people who are vaccinated will catch the disease. Since the vast majority of people are vaccinated, it's no surprise that most of the victims were vaccinated.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
Great, the you won't mind if I build a coal fire plant next to your home? Cause that's my choice.
Also, I drive on the left side of the road, because I'm an 'merican and that's my choice, fuck all of you.
'merica FUCK YEAH.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're right except I can't take the risk of my child getting a deadly illness until he or she is age 20 (when the brain reaches full maturity). I make the decisions.
Besides: My house; my rules. Outside my house people can do as they please (I will not force them), but inside my house then they obey the rules. No smoking. No cursing. No stealing. No illegal immigration through my front door unless they ASK first if they may enter. And so on.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Sadly, with fewer people getting vaccinated, there's more of a chance for pockets of disease to linger, and catch not only unvaccinated people but also those who didn't respond strongly to the vaccine.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
According to the article, only 8% of kids were unvaccinated. So even if they were ten times as likely to get the disease, most of the cases will still be vaccinated kids.
What TFA actually says is that vaccinated kids are LESS likely to get the disease, and kids with multiple booster shots are even less likely to get it. The article's conclusion is that the vaccines work, but they work even better with a booster. The misleading Slashdot headline and summary implies the opposite conclusion.
>>>Really? You have no problem with murder?
Dumbass question. You already know the answer because it's obvious. Nobody has the right to infringe upon another's rights (damage to their body or property (car)).
"Nobody has the right to harm another. And that's all the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson; author of the Declaration, coauthor of the Bill of Rights, founder of the Democrat Party, second highest IQ among our presidents (estimated at 150-160).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I think you are mixing up your diseases. There hasn't been a case of smallpox since 1978 and there hasn't been a case in the wild since 1975. Perhaps you mean polio.
Also, pertussis is a bacteria, not a virus, and the form found in cattle is not the same as the one that causes whooping cough in humans.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
How many people died of smallpox each year before vaccinations? Now it's zero. While we'll never be able to completely eliminate the theoretical possibility that smallpox may come back at some point in the future, the smallpox vaccine has done tremendous good for mankind.
Of course not. There are lots of ways to get an education besides forcing people to attend government-owned schools or government-scripted syllabi. Reading books for example..... that's pretty much how all Americans did it prior to 1850 (example: Lincoln) or 1900 (people living on farms). Even today there are private colleges where the entire curriculum is based-around reading books from Greeks, Romans, renaissance authors, et cetera. They do not follow the government-proscribed model.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
HepA is "required" in Texas - gave our 2.5yr old a 108 fever and a trip to the ER for an ice bath.
I think TFA's headline was pretty accurate: Whooping cough vaccine fades in pre-teens.
The CDC is apparently now recommending whooping cough booster shots be given at age 11:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/pertussis/recs-summary.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/pertussis/default.htm#recs
Nothing (anti-vaccine) to see here. Move along.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Pointing out the inevitable consequences of not vaccinating isn't "bashing".
Not everyone can be vaccinated, and many (such as the elderly) don't develop a strong immunity when vaccinated. For example, in my son's kindergarten class, there's a kid who have to have a liver transplant, and hence is on immunosuppressive drugs. Having my kids vaccinated helps protect that kid's life.
You don't understand how vaccines work.
They expose the adaptive immune system to the virus/bacterium in question. The adaptive immune system develops (in a pretty much evolutionary way) a response. It's unique to every individual - no two people produce the same antibodies. Some of them are more effective than others (hence the differing strength of immunity people display after being vaccinated, and why some rare people get really lucky and develop robust immune responses even to outliers like HIV) but there's such a variety that disease organisms can't "evolve immunity" in the way you're talking about.
Some fast-mutating viruses - like the flu, or even more, the cold viruses - can change enough to require new vaccines periodically, sure. But (a) that's not 'evolving immunity to a vaccine' and (b) the old vaccine remains just as effective against the old variants.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If your local health authority depends from a democratically elected body and is monitored by an independent body, then yeah, common sense indicates that I should trust their judgements in general terms.
This is not to say you should not be vigilant, but in general terms if you are not vigilant you are still likely to be OK (the decrease of infant mortality, longer life spans and better conditions of life later in life are proof that such optimism is not misplaced).
In other places you may have no choice: health service would be so precarious that it would not be a major concern, or you would be forcibly vaccinated to protect the fatherland.
So at the end, yeah, you as an individual have limited choice, because whatever the quality of your society you live on one and your choices don't take place in a vacuum (the day they do you are most welcome to do whatever you see fit), by limiting our choices within reasonable limits we benefit from joint action against diseases.
If everybody acts on his own, we can as well go back to the Middle Ages and wait for the next bout of the pest.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I used to expect a Slashdot poster to have either properly read or at least fairly summarize the article posted. This is the third time in a month period in which the title/summary has been misleading. It is this type of practice that assists the viral spread of the misleading headline/summary which eventually becomes the whole story for less discerning news sources. The Reuters headline itself is much more accurate "Whooping cough vaccine fades in pre-teens: study", based on the content of the article itself. The statistics seem to say (correctly) that an unvaccinated child is disproportionally more likely to be infected with whooping cough. The discovery was that the vaccine used on children did not appear to be as effective over time as the booster shot schedule expected. The length of time from the last booster shot is correlated to the an increased chance of infection, which was larger than expected in later years. The conclusion being this booster shot cycle should adjusted so booster shots occur more frequently. What would be more interesting is to discover whether it was the loss of herd immunity due to unvaccinated children which led to the outbreak. Vaccines are known to often be only effect 95-99% of the time and often fade over time requiring booster shots. As herd immunity levels decrease the chance of propagation throughout a population every time individuals are in contact increases. It possible and even likely that it was this loss of herd immunity that exposed the larger than expected "fading" in strength of the vaccine's effects, which otherwise would have remained relatively unrealized and unimportant.
Yeah strange the conclusion they quickly jump to is: give more immunizations, not anything about "effectiveness" of the vaccine itself, or lets do some science and find out why. I guess when you let business interests run medicine, blah blah blah
>>>Great, the you won't mind if I build a coal fire plant next to your home?
Nope.
Modern coal plants are cleaner than the exhaust coming out of my and my neighbors' cars. It's just water vaper coming out of newly-built coal stacks. So go ahead and build it.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
This is one of those stories where there's actually something useful you can do. If you haven't gotten a Tdap booster as an adult yet, do so when you get your next Td booster. (You do get a Td booster every ten years, right? You don't want tetanus, do you? You know they used to call it "lockjaw", right? You know the bacteria that cause tetanus survive in the environment outside of living hosts, right?)
No, the vaccine worked. The reason most of the children who got infected also had the vaccines, was that 81% of all children had recieved the vaccine.
No, as I read it it's 81% of those with whooping cough who were infected. I can't see the proportion of the population who were vaccinated. It's an important point, though, and was my first thought. If 99% of the population is vaccinated, 100% of those not vaccinated get whooping cough and only 10% of those vaccinated get it then most kids with whooping cough would be fully vaccinated, by a factor of almost ten to one. Could they really have made such a basic statistical blunder, though?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
So, is a booster shot really worthwhile? Particularly for their own health?
Nope, it's for the health of others (babies). Welcome to society; enjoy your stay!
I got a DTaP because I had a daughter on the way and knew my previous shot had worn of loooong ago. The shot was not for my sake, but for hers.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
There's a group of people on /. that react to vaccination as they react to nuclear power: Any critic is a nut case.
Every time I get a Tetanus shot I am sick for a couple days. But since it is only every 10y, I of course forget and when I schedule the next shot I only remember afterwards that I should have picked a different day.
No, I am not an anti-vaxxer and have all my updates. But I do read through CDC recommendations, watch for changes, and read up on efficacy. If there is an update to a more aggressive vaccination pattern for young kids, I check: Where does the new risk assessment come from? Is it based on new studies? Or are there epidemiological changes in the population? Are we part of a high risk group? How high will the exposure be? What recommendations are there in other countries?
After that, I just might decide to delay a vaccination.
Thank you. I had to make this point several times in the last round of discussing vaccines on Slashdot: vaccines do not make everyone 100% immune to the disease. They decrease the chances of getting sick, or if you get sick they may decrease the severity of the illness, but they do not provide 100% immunity to everyone.
Therefore, even if your kid is vaccinated against a disease, exposing him to an outbreak of the disease will still increase his chances of getting sick over his chances if he were not exposed to the disease at all. Therefore, unvaccinated children present a risk to vaccinated children.
This does not even take into account the people who are unable to be vaccinated, or the kids who (in this case) haven't managed to get a booster shot before their immunization wears off.
It seems to me that another important data point would be the actual mortality rate vaccinated vs non-vaccinated? Or even the rate of hospitalizations per cohort (vaccinated vs non-vaccinated). Does anyone know if the study has this data? Thanks!
You know why those coal stacks are clean? Becuase someone (the governement) forces the companies to build them that way. I am pretty sure when geekoid just throws one together nextdoor (I hope the neighbors arnt home when he starts it) clean air regulations will not be followed.
I thought it was bad enough there were global warming denialists running slashdot, but now antivaxxers. The people running this site should know better than to feed these trolls. What has this become? The last refuge of semi tech-literate libertarian nutjobs?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Even today there are private colleges where the entire curriculum is based-around reading books from Greeks, Romans, renaissance authors, et cetera. They do not follow the government-proscribed model.
And how's that different than any other college, public or private? We also did the same in public high school (as did many other people I know in many other states).
By the way, "proscribe" means something entirely different than what you probably intended.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Either version can cause shingles later in life. In fact, early research is bearing out predictions that mass chicken pox vaccinations will lead to increased shingles rates.
The reason that the shingles rates are increasing is that the wild virus is not circulating (and thus not rechallenging) as previously. Without repeated exposure to the virus, immune response declines over time until the viruses lurking in the nerve roots get a chance to bloom again (just like cold sores.)
Which was what was predicted. The good news, though, is that the rates will decline again because (you can look this up) the vaccine strain does not cause the same latent infection (or not the same magnitude of latent infection) as the wild virus. Ideally a recombinant vaccine may be developed to do a better job, but I'm not complaining -- I know I have the latent infection and will cheerfully accept the half-measures as an alternative to shingles.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The article and summary are misleading in focusing on overall counts of infection rather than rates of infection, which take into account both the number of cases and the relative rates of vaccination. The better statistics to summarize from the article are the 'attack rates' (number of those who get the disease per 100,000 person-years). The article breaks these down by age and by vaccination status (Table 2, p. 23). For ages 2-7, attack rates were 359 for vaccinated and 606 for under and non-vaccinated. This difference in attack rates, though fairly large, was not large enough to reach statistical significance. For ages 8-12, attack rates were 2453 and 3211 respectively, again a non-significant difference. For ages 13-18, attack rates were 452 and 2189 -- this difference does yield a statistically significant advantage for those vaccinated Looking over all ages, attack rates were 1011 and 2073, respectively, again a statistically significant advantage for those vaccinated. The two big points are a) the large overall advantage of being vaccinated compared to being under- or non-vaccinated, and b) the age-related increase in the attack rate for those vaccinated that occurs during gaps between boosters (between 8-12). Overall, both points are strong evidence for the efficacy of the vaccine over non-vaccination. The author's articles claim in the introduction that "our unvaccinated and under-vaccinated population did not appear to contribute significantly to the increased rate of clinical pertussis" (p. 5). This seems contradicted by their data, but it is not revised or re-considered in the discussion. They may perhaps mean that given the low(ish) rate of under/non vaccination that this group had a relatively small contribution to the overall number of cases. It is clear from the attack rate analysis, however, those in this group were 4.8X more likely to develop whooping cough than those fully vaccinated (overall attack rate of 2189/100,000ppy for under/non divided by 452 for those vaccinated). The summary and headline should probably be revised. By tallying raw counts it's like saying "Honda's are most involved in accidents" which may be true in terms of raw counts due to their popularity but not true in terms of accident rates.
We are like dwarfs falling from the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more dazzling, than they did,
So you mean a vaccine didn't actually prevent a disease? Hmmm. I'm not a tinfoiler that thinks vaccines are worthless. But when I was little, I got a "virus" that mimicked the symptoms of Measles quite closely. Even though I had been vaccinated for that and the doctors assured my parent's there was no way it could be the measles.
And that's all fine if your older kids have babies in the household. But a large segment of society does not. And they'll never get a pertussis vaccination.
At some point, people with infants have got to think about exposure to this general public. And that includes moms who plop their two or three month olds down next to the hobo with the TB cough at Starbucks.
Have gnu, will travel.
I, however, have suffered massive reactions to vaccines in the past and now refuse them. The worst was a HepC which knocked me on my arse for a month. Never finished the full course of that vaccine.
That's a great anecdote, except for the fact that there is currently no vaccine for hepatitis C.
Diseases do not 'only' vanish when everyone is vaccinated. Some diseases have disappeared, or are now uncommon, despite vaccines never being developed for them.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
>>>Becuase someone (the governement) forces the companies to build them that way.
And I don't have a problem with that. Corporations are a creation of the government, and government can regulate its creation in any fashion it chooses.
Also we have a right to clean air. Coal companies spewing coal dust into our lungs should be forced to scrub that exhaust until there's nothing left but water vaper.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Large. That's the word you want.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sorry, I wrote that the swine flu vaccine caused autism, which was wrong. It caused narcolepsy.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
The article does say that between 8 and 12 the vaccine only protected 24% of the time, compared to about 50% for all kids. So at 245 cases per 10,000 with full vaccinations, you would expect around 325 cases without. Of course in a school with 10,000 kids, those extra 80 cases may cause even more cases.
I think the /. Editors need to start reading the effing article and producing clearer summaries. The current summary could easily lead someone to assume you were more likely to catch the disease if you got the vaccine.