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Uptick In Whooping Cough Linked To Subpar Vaccines
sciencehabit writes "Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study (abstract) confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don't offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do."
If neither vaccine was effective, there would have been no change. However, there was an observed uptick, indicating that the previous vaccine was definitely having an effect.
Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.
These reduced-effectiveness vaccines are like many "safer", "greener", or otherwise "less harmful" solutions; they have their drawbacks, but only a fool would try to push their solution by advertising those drawbacks. Now we're seeing two effects. A re-emergence of pertussis, and decreased public confidence in vaccines.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I guess that would explain all these horrible outbreaks of polio, mumps, and measles we've been having....
Oh, wait, we aren't having large outbreaks of these diseases? Well, then I guess vaccines work.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
you have proof the DNA of the disease is the same then as now?
they might have that proof, actually.
but more than that they have the last years stats of the people who were vaccinated 20+ years ago. presumably the change didn't happen overnight either so there would be some overlap there as well where some age group got either one.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides and your statement is evidence of that. The data suggesting that vaccines are working is overwhelming and trying to deny that they have worked is ridiculous. There is also risk to vaccines and they can cause harm and trying to deny that is ridiculous. The bigger question is whether or not over use of vaccines is creating a similar problem as the overuse of antibiotics. And in the process are we actually reducing our ability to adapt as a species to environmental pressure and stress.
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I suggest you try thinking harder next time.
Smallpox would still be around if they didn't work, and other diseases would be much more common.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Couldn't they just give the safe one first and the older, more effective one a few months later? And if not, why not just do the weaker one yearly? I think an elegant solution for a lot of these weaker vaccines is to simply do them yearly, around the same time you get your flu shot. Other than further aggravating the Jenny McCarthys of the world, I think this would be a fine solution.
With population exploding, shouldn't we return to an era where the weak were culled out?...
Unless you live in Africa, population is not exploding. The population growth rate is slowing, the UN predicts that the world population will stabilize around 2090 and fall afterwards. Most (more recent) predictions think that this estimate is pessimistic - it's looking like population will stabilize around 2050 and decline afterwards.
Most industrialized nations have negative population growth already, the US *would* have negative population growth if you discount immigration. Even with immigration, the US population is slowing and will turn the corner sometime in the next couple of decades.
... back in the day old people had the grace to die of diabetes or a heart attack, now they live until 90, but don't work the last 30 years of their lives, effectively eating the seed corn of the new generation.
I think the problems you are seeing is due to a lack of an evolved sense of morality. On your part.
Our "ability to adapt as a species" would mean simply letting people die if they weren't already immune. Unless you're aware of some Lamarkian pressure I don't know about.
Use of vaccines does create a selective pressure for vaccines to adapt, which is why they're used for the most dangerous diseases or in the most at-risk groups, or so broadly that a disease doesn't have a chance to adapt before it loses all of its possible niches. Adios, smallpox. Time to get your coat, polio.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I guess that would explain all these horrible outbreaks of polio, mumps, and measles we've been having....
Oh, wait, we aren't having large outbreaks of these diseases? Well, then I guess vaccines work.
No, they don't.
See, what has happened is that folks who are naturally immune have peed in water. Now, since the essence of their immunity has gone into the water, we have been drinking the homeopathic cure!
But don't tell anyone! The homeopathic industry needs their revenue for all the R&D they have to prove the effectiveness of their products with their scientific studies.
Like this one:
"Drink this Homeopathic medicine for your sickness. Do you fell better?"
"Yep!"
"There you go! A 100% effectiveness rate!"
Do you get your children vaccinated?
It's much more likely that your child will have a bad reaction to the vaccine than to actually get the disease. And if everyone *else* gets vaccinated, there's no need for any specific child to take that risk. That's the dilemma facing parents nowadays - from their individual viewpoint, there's a higher risk from the vaccination than there is from the disease.
Taking polio (about 30 years ago) as an example, the chance of getting polio from the vaccine was about 1 in 750,000. Polio became largely non-existent in the US during the later years of the vaccination program, so individually it's easy to see why parents might not want to take the risk.
And yet if everyone makes the best choice for their personal welfare, polio runs rampant in the country with 35,000 cases per year.
This is a variant of the Prisoner's dilemma, where if everyone does what's in their immediate best interest then everyone suffers needlessly.
We must accept the fact that sometimes we forced to take risks, and sometimes those risks will go badly. The risks are structured such that by taking the forced risk we are lowering everyone's total risk, and in the case of diseases, lowering it to a point where eventually no one will have to take the risk in the future.
Whatever. I still don't support homeopathic marriages or adoptions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"All natural, no dyes. That's a good business - all-natural children's toys. Those toy companies, they don't arbitrarily mark up their frogs. They don't lie about how much they spend on research and development. And the worst that a toy company can be accused of is making a really boring frog. Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit. You know another really good business? Teeny tiny baby coffins. You can get them in frog green, fire engine red. Really. The antibodies in yummy mummy only protect the kid for six months, which is why these companies think they can gouge you. They think that you'll spend whatever they ask to keep your kid alive. Want to change things? Prove them wrong. A few hundred parents like you decide they'd rather let their kid die then cough up 40 bucks for a vaccination, believe me, prices will drop *really* fast. Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit, gribbit, gribbit."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Kaiser Permanente introduced the vaccines gradually, and have children of the same age with one or the other (or both). This is the source of the 5.6x more likely to get it number.
The older one has more antigens. The older one also had more lawsuits, even though science to this day cannot prove it caused the other problems.
And statistically we'd still be better off with the old one, unproven problems and all, compared to the new one. But there was a telling comment by a scientist -- western societies would no longer "accapt" the old one.
Thank your lawyers. They got rich (Congress even set up a fund for "victims", even though no connection was shown) and people died in increased numbers because of their actions.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
For any parent, guardian, or patient to make an informed decision, we have to have two pieces of information: how well a medicine generally works, and what risks there are to take it. Number One Son does this with several medicines: Colcrys controls the symptoms of his Familial Mediteranian Fever, at the risk of messing with his liver. He takes the flu shot because of the risk to the 1 and a half lung he has left are higher than the risks of the vaccine itself.
A vaccine that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, means that vaccinated patients are accepting the vaccine risk for no significant reward.
I am not anti-vaccine, I am just against unneeded risk. My kids got a round of the Salk vaccine, because the Sabin vaccine might wear out. We also did the chicken pox vaccine, to try to prevent shingles later in life (both families have had extreme shingles outbreaks later in life). OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior and the real side-effect rate to the vaccine is a lot higher than the manufacturer is reporting.
My own anecdote is that the reporting on pertussis is off by at least half to two-thirds. Little Miss fought a persistent cough (with antibiotics) for weeks until her allergist said "oh, you have whooping cough. You sound exactly like I did last week." There was no use testing her, because she'd been on antibiotics. Milady and I both caught it from her. The nurse ruined my test by doing it wrong, and Milady's doctor flat-out wouldn't test her (she just got antibiotics, because she was #3 in the house to catch it). The scuttlebutt in the health profession was that the Health Department was desperately trying to keep their numbers down, by hook or by crook.
With my kids' various lung-related issues, they needed a vaccine that actually helps prevent whooping cough. The current one isn't it.
Agreed. If anything antibiotics and vaccines have completely opposite mechanisms of action.
An antibiotic taken as a medication kills bacteria directly, assisting the immune system and making its job easier. In the case of bleaching every surface in your house, it means that the immune system never sees the bacteria in the first place. The same is true of other external use of antibiotics (killing of bacteria before it gets into your body).
A vaccine provokes your immune response against a pathogen without exposing you to the risk of developing the disease (or a greatly reduced risk). Your immune system does all the work, and as a result it is able to do the job entirely on its own much more effectively at a later time.
Comparing the approaches, the disinfectant approach is like bleaching your house 3x/day, and the vaccine approach is like rolling around in the mud and not washing before dinner. I'd be very hesitant to associate the problems of the one with the other.
Please don't confuse vaccines with medication (antibiotics). There is plenty of evidence that antibiotic use leads to resistance. There is plenty of evidence that vaccine overuse leads to less disease, and extinction of the pathogen. Completely different situations. Completely different conditions. Completely different theories. There is nothing they have in common. Don't worry. Common mistake.
$CONSPIRACYTHEORY
Ooh, ooh . . . let me play . . . I'm good at this!
"The government has been working on vaccines that cause autism to use against political enemies by the IRS, which will be running Obamacare, which is why the IRS sorted out the political enemies' tax exemption forms, because those political enemies are against Obamacare, so they won't get the Obamacare autism causing vaccines, which is why the IRS planned to delay processing the tax exemption forms, until the paper borne version of the virus could complete testing in Libya, but the Libyans discovered that the IRS papers distributed to them by the US embassy were the cause of their autistic births, and then stormed the embassy, which was covered up by the government to look like an average Islamic riot, which was working, until the Associated Press found out about it, and was planning to publish, but IRS found out about that, and told then the FBI to tap the phone lines of the Associated Press, so they could find all the journalists and the government leaks, so they could be given a potent adult version of the autistic causing vaccine, and therefore silence them all up, and so this is why the Associated Press reporters are acting all autistic now, and . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
This.
From the article (emphasis mine):
During the 1980s, U.S. parents successfully sued manufacturers, alleging that the whole-cell vaccine also caused long-term brain damage. A 1991 Institute of Medicine report concluded that this was unproven, but by then many pertussis vaccine manufacturers had withdrawn from the market, leading Congress to create a federal vaccine injury compensation program for families who could show a strong case for vaccine damage.
Sound familiar?
One of the first areas in the US hit by a modern pertussis outbreak was here in California. It wasn't among poor people who couldn't afford the vaccine, like you might expect in emergent epidemics. Instead, it was in Marin County, home of highly affluent post-hippy folks like (say) George Lucas. These folks have been reading all of the holistic alternative medicine literature for years and have convinced themselves that every single article is another threat to the precious, precious unborn babies that they plan to have spring from their middle-aged wombs, and so huge numbers of them have decided to stop vaccinating altogether. Shock, horror, when the result is a resurgence of a disease that had been all but unseen in the area for decades, and a couple of those precious babies actually die.
You see the same thing all over the world. In France, there's some kind of conspiracy theory going around that the measles vaccine is bad. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases around. In 2011, there were 118 cases of measles in the entire United States in the first five months; in France, which has only about twice the population of California, there were 17,000.
On the positive side, people, including childless adults, can help to stop the spread of pertussis by getting a booster vaccination, which helps to increase herd immunity. If you catch whooping cough as an adult, you won't die, you'll get a very lousy respiratory illness for a while. But if you don't catch pertussis, you can't spread it to people who are more vulnerable, like children and the elderly. Right now, doctors believe you need a booster about once in your adult life. It's easy to get -- you can get it bundled with your tetanus vaccine, which if you're smart, you're getting every 10 years or so anyway. Last time I got a tetanus shot, I got the pertussis booster with it, and there was no change in price (i.e. both were fully covered by insurance).
Breakfast served all day!
From what I see all the denial is coming from one side. Doctors and scientists have never said that vaccines are 100% effective or that they are 100% safe. Like all medication, there are risks and side effects. For the vast majority of people, the side effects are rare and not serious. There is a large database to keep track of side effects and a special vaccine court set up to hear cases of side effects. The court was started to bypass the lengthy trials that normally is associated with a civil suit and is a no-fault system. However in the case of autism, the court (and science) has found no credible link. The initial claim of a link has been discredited due to fraud. Even the study that first suggested a link has been retracted due to this fraud.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.
Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.
OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior and the real side-effect rate to the vaccine is a lot higher than the manufacturer is reporting.
Hate to say this, but going by teen pregnancy studies parents who make statements like this are the one's who's kids are most at risk.
Also, what sort of creditable study do you have that the risks are higher than what the manufacturer claims? If so, wouldn't the CDC be shutting them down?
I don't read AC A human right
HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.
Why do you think that HPV is "incredibly rare"?
Population of US : ~251 million [http://www.census.gov/popclock/]
Population of US with HPV : ~79 million [http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm]
That is ~31% of the population of a country which is aware of the disease and actively fighting it.
Dr. House. Brilliant. Rude. Crazy. Determined. I see the quote marks around it - but you never attributed it. Those of us that are fans can't miss it. But I would imagine there are a whole heck of a lot of people wondering what the heck you are going on about.
in the past 100 years expeted lifespan has jumped 30+ years in the western world.
our quality of life, relatively disease free, was previously unknown. it's still unknown in the parts of the world where they cant get vaccines.
100 years ago being crippled by polio was so common one of our greatest presidents was one such victim.
100 years ago becoming deaf from mumps was common; how many deaf kids do you see today? ya. almost none.
we live longer and better. and vaccines are a huge part of that.
if you want to think differently, i suggest you google smallpox, or visit pakistan or northern india where they still have polio cases.
look at old history photos of what disease wards used to look like, the myriad different diseases and the pain and sufferign caused by them.
or just look at the number of measles (one of hte msot contagious diseases in human history; a person with measles walks through a room, that room remains contagious for 4 hours afterward) cases in our own country. prior to the vaccine in the mid 60's there were >500K cases every year. Within 5 years it dropped to fewer than 100 cases per year. It's been declared effectively eliminated in our country and the rest of the western world.
the people who think vaccines are bad, or overrated, have no clue what they are talking about, and would be shocked to death by the difference between todays world and that of just 100 years, and the amount of disease and suffering that people had to put up with.
TLDR: you're an idiot. vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of mankind.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I went to a conference on vaccines several years ago where somebody gave a talk on whooping cough vaccine. He said that there was a problem with the vaccine made from the whole bacterial cell, and it did have a small number of adverse effects, not as bad as whooping cough itself but more common than the other standard vaccines. At that time they were working on a new acellular vaccine, which wouldn't have as many or as serious adverse effects.
Now they have it. That's the tradeoff. Fewer adverse effects but less effectiveness.
None of this is unproven. It's well proven. You can look it up in the textbooks.
If we didn't have so much resistance to vaccines in general, they could have gotten away with a more effective vaccine that had more common adverse effects. It would have been less comfortable but with fewer deaths.
And, unfortunately, this means they become a victim of their own success. People today (and I include myself in this) don't remember when polio or measles or smallpox ran rampant. They don't remember the fear of catching one of these or how serious it is. I've read enough accounts so that I understand intellectually, but I'll never know in a "living it day to day" way. Something for which I'm extremely thankful.
Sadly, some people, in ignorance, assume that these diseases were "basically like colds." You get the measles, stay home for a few days until the bumps disappear and you're good to go. They ignore all of the death or life-long disabilities these diseases brought with them. Next, they buy into the "vaccines are so risky" crowd's talk (vaccines have "toxins" in them. [scary voice]TOOOOOXXXXIIIINNNNNNSSSS!!!!!!{/scary voice]) and mentally increase the risk of the vaccines.
The end result is that these people decide not to vaccinate because they see the vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases when the reality is the exact opposite. In such a big way, mind you, that saying "the exact opposite" still feels like an understatement. And when large groups of these people make these faulty risk assessments, they increase the risk of not only them and their children, but of people who can't be vaccinated for valid reasons (too young, immune system issues, allergies, etc.).
I guarantee you that almost none of these anti-vax folks would be complaining about the MMR if measles was as rampant today as it was before the vaccine was introduced. The ones that would still be complaining would be shouted down by the crowds flocking to get the MMR.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's possible, in theory, with some vaccines. But the original pertussis vaccine was a killed bacteria vaccine, which means that the entire organism was present. For it to mutate to survive the immunity it would have to turn into something completely different, so resistance is not a factor in this case.
Some new vaccines may use a limited number of antigens instead of whole organism. If they use few enough, the organism could conceivably mutate to not express that antigen anymore. But even newer vaccines that are in wide circulation include many antigens, so that's still not likely.