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.'"

Comments

Re:stop the sensationalist crap

[samkass]

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.

Re:The really sad thing is vaccines improving

[compro01]

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.

Re:So the vaccine has a 10 % failure rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Depends...

[trims]

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:

• INFANT (i.e. under 2 years of age) mortality reductions are overwhelmingly due to two things: (1) improvements in reducing childbirth deaths and complications (2) infant vaccinations. Sanitation (but not necessarily clean water) has helped somewhat, but not anywhere near as much as getting the kid out of the mother in good shape, and effective pre- and post-natal care. Vaccines (even though most aren't fully protected until after 2 years of age) have nonetheless stopped cold the huge killers of infants: measles, smallpox, pertussis, etc.
• CHILDHOOD (2-12) mortality reductions are pretty much split between vaccinations and improved clean water/sanitation, maybe with the latter edging out for bigger impact (probably due mostly to reducing malaria, cholera and typhus).
• TEENAGE (13-18) mortality reductions are due to a combination of vaccines (TB, smallpox, polio, and measles being a big here), clean water/sanitation, and trauma medicine.
• ADULT (18-65) reductions are mostly clean water/sanitation, with trauma medicine following up behind. Vaccinations aren't a huge contributor here, since the vast majority of folks died of the major vaccinated diseases before they got to be adults, and thus, a much smaller percentage of people were saved.
• ELDERLY (65+) mortality reductions are heavily improvements in drugs and chronic illness treatments (think cancer and heart disease).

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