Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It goes without saying that the moronic get what they deserve, though sadly, when herd immunity is compromised, sometimes the innocent (those who cannot be inoculated) pay the price too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... and other idiots
I actually have a co-worker who refused to get the MMR vaccine for his two children, both of whom came down with the measles last year. They didn't shun the vaccine because of religious reasons; rather, Jenny McCarthy convinced them that it would give their children autism. And while it's entertaining to watch this, and it's fun to sit back and mock these people, their belief system, and the consequences of their actions, the fact remains that these idiots are a real threat to our herd immunity.
The real answer to this is education, although that's almost as dirty a word as "vaccination" in 2013 United States.
We even now have a permanent Tetanus combo booster shot (TDAP) instead of the old every ten year one (that probably expired, don't step on a rusty nail!).
Correlation is not causation, but not getting an MMR measles mumps rubella shot is just criminal. Without herd immunity we're starting to see hospitals requiring people to wear masks or stay in isolation wards, measures we never had to do before the "fad" of not getting shots started.
And, no, I don't care what your objections are - there are nasal spray versions of all the shots, so stop endangering everyone else with your stupidity.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
PDP-11s forever!
So... this is what happens when you don't use your brain -- and you take medical advice from a stripper.
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
After reports of half a dozen or so children dying because they were not vaccinated parents will start getting their children vaccinated again. Pitty some kids will have to die first though.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
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.