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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.'"
Then get your talking points straight. When somebody has concerns about thiomersal in the vaccine and the effect it may have on his child, stop yelling at him and calling him ignorant. Simply explain that the vaccine his child will receive will have no thiomersal in it. Is it so bloody difficult? Instead we get self-righteous doctors who assume that anybody that has this concern must be some kind of an idiot. Is it any wonder people start avoiding these jackasses and not vaccinating their kids? Fix the attitude, and vaccinations will increase.
That's irrelevant. The issue is that doctors ignore the concerns of the patient and want to be treated as infallible. If the patient does not want thimerosal, he should have the option not to get it. The doctors have no bloody right to force it upon him.