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U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have announced that measles cases in the U.S. spiked this year, rising to three times their recent average rate. It's partly due to a greater number of people traveling to the U.S. when they're infectious, but also because a frustrating number of people are either failing to have their children vaccinated, or are failing to do so in a timely manner. Dr. Thomas Friedman said, 'Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.' Phil Plait adds, 'In all three of these outbreaks, someone who had not been vaccinated traveled overseas and brought the disease back with them, which then spread due to low vaccination rates in their communities. It's unclear how much religious beliefs themselves were behind the outbreaks in Brooklyn and North Carolina; it may have been due to widespread secular anti-vax beliefs in those tight-knit groups. But either way, a large proportion of the people in those areas were unvaccinated.'"
"Vaccines am bad. Electronic cigarettes am perfectly safe." - Jenny McCarthy.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The thing is that her kid did not even have autism and is now responding well to the condition he really does have.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Sure, it sucks for the kids, but let's not pretend that the measles are fatal with the exception of a tiny fraction of cases.
Huh? Quoth wikipedia:
Between the years 1987 and 2000, the case fatality rate across the United States was 3 measles-attributable deaths per 1000 cases, or 0.3%. In underdeveloped nations with high rates of malnutrition and poor healthcare, fatality rates have been as high as 28%. In immunocompromised patients (e.g. people with AIDS) the fatality rate is approximately 30%.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.
E pluribus unum
You could at least get your talking points from somewhere that at least updates them. Thiomersal is gone from all childhood vaccines except flu, and even then it's only in the multidose vials.
And guess what? The removal hasn't done anything to autism rates or anything else.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
No, 10% of the people who were infected were also vaccinated. That doesn't mean there is a 10% failure rate in the vaccine. There are many many more people vaccinated than not vaccinated. To get the actual failure rate you would need to compute number_of_people_vaccinated_and_infected/number_of_people_vaccinated_and_exposed. With the later being very difficult to calculate.
I still don't understand why anyone would turn to insurance for predictable expenses - that's like getting car insurance that covers gas and tires. Just seems crazy to me.
While I don't love that insurance is used for predictable things, insurance companies know that people who see the doctor regularly, get the tests their doctors recommend for them and take their prescribed medication cost less to insure when the unpredictable [well, unpredictable in small numbers] happens.
So, to make sure that you cost as little as possible to insure, your insurance covers predictable expenses.
Because insurers know this, they can buy in bulk -- sending you to in-network doctors, hospitals and pharmacies at a discount over their standard fee rate, further reducing the total cost (to them) to insure you.
You could argue that your premium should be lower, and you should perhaps be required to comply with doctors orders, but I'm pretty sure we know how that'd turn out.
Acutally, it *is* eradicated in the wild. The last documented case of naturally occuring smallpox was in 1977. WHO officially declared it eradicated in 1979. You may be confusing it with polio, which they're still trying to chase down and eliminate the last pockets of.
With effective modern medical care, the death rate from measles is about 0.1%. If proper care is not given, it can be as high as 10%. Just prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in the USA, approximately 450 people died each year of the disease, and 48,000 had complications severe enough to require hospitalization.
The potential for encephalitis can be a bit of a downer, even in the nonlethal cases. As much as I think 'neurological sequelae' is a cool phrase, it isn't one you want to see in your file.
Seriously, I've had like 5 diseases (measles, mumps, varicella, rubella and influenzaa) as a child...and I'm still alive and quite healthy with ZERO side effects of having had those diseases.
Do you know you've had zero side effects? My dad's heard valve was damaged by measles (no vaccine when he was a kid) and he didn't know until he was in his 50s and it stopped functioning properly.
In any case I've ridden in cars and jet aircraft without seat belts and am still around but that doesn't mean I don't use them when they've available.
Big pharma marketing has apparently been successful in creating a nation of hypochondriacs.
Actually vaccines aren't big moneymakers and in in fact stopped being produced at all in the US until Congress stepped in.
40-60% is total childhood mortality in primitive societies. Most of the reduction in childhood mortality since then is probably due to better sanitation, better treatment of diarrhea, and the use of antibiotics, not vaccinations.
When comparing modern mortality improvement over the older pre-industrial, pre-modern-medicine regimes, the "most helpful" reductions vary with the age group you're dealing with:
Overall, clean water and sanitation probably win as the single most important advancement in public health, ever, but vaccines are a *very* strong second. Frankly, drugs are at best a distant fourth, behind even improved medical understanding of the human body (enabling more effective trauma and non-drug treatments of common diseases and accidents). Drug improvements really have helped two big categories of people: soldiers at war, and the elderly.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
And just to be explicit about what some of those sequelae can be: retardation and/or blindness. Measles is NOT an "Oh, tough it out" disease.