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Diphtheria Returns To Spain For Lack of Vaccination
TuringTest writes: A six-year-old child was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona and diagnosed with diphtheria, which hasn't occurred in Spain since 1986 and was largely unheard of in western Europe. The boy had not been vaccinated despite the vaccine being available in free vaccination programs. Spanish general health secretary called anti-vaccination campaigns "irresponsible" and said: "The right to vaccination is for children, not for the parents to decide." The child is in critical condition, though he's now being treated with a serum expressly brought from Russia through an emergency procedure.
No. Vaccination rates are highest in the Bible belt, while they are lowest on the west coast. I think it has less to do with political affiliation and more to do with who reads idiot granola mommy and food blogs.
Bible Belt states have some of the highest AND the lowest vaccination rates.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
And as usual, it is probably a combination of factors which influence the anti-vaccination attitudes.
Though one factor does seem to be common - clustering.
I.e. It's social. Where there's one anti-vaxxer, there's more anti-vaxxer.
Overall, national vaccination rates seem high: The median rate of coverage for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, administered to most before entry into kindergarten, was 94.7 percent for the 2013-14 school year. But, as Schuchat points out, the rate is lower in communities where unvaccinated families tend to cluster. In some areas, low rates might have more to do with access to clinics than with beliefs about vaccinations.
"The national estimates hide what's going on state to state. The state estimates hide what's going on community to community. And within communities there may be pockets," Schuchat said. "It's one thing if you have a year where a number of people are not vaccinating, but year after year in terms of the kids that are exempting, you do start to accumulate."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Diphtheria has a very serious "side effect", and I suspect the percentage of patients who develop it is larger than the percentage that react to the vaccine. Wikipedia says:
"Diphtheria is fatal in between 5% and 10% of cases. In children under five years and adults over 40 years, the fatality rate may be as much as 20%.[17] In 2013 it resulted in 3,300 deaths down from 8,000 deaths in 1990.[6]"
The Diphtheria vaccine doesn't prevent infection, it only immunizes against the effects of the toxin the bacteria produce.
Thus, it's still around and kicking, it just doesn't kill people anymore as most people can fight off the infection on their own without the toxin wreaking havoc on their body. And most people won't even notice anything other than "flu-like symptoms" as all the effects of Diptheria are caused by the toxin, rather than the presence of the bacterial infection.
The poor kid probably just got coughed on, or touched something and then cross-contaminated something he put in his mouth.
I don't think it survives in the environment, and it doesn't seem to have any animal hosts. There are places in the world where it's endemic and somewhat common, and it can live in the pharynx of vaccinated or asymptomatic humans. So it probably comes into a country from an immigrant or traveler with some frequency, it just doesn't spread because of vaccination.
Then there's this kid.
From microbewiki (emphasis added): "C. diphtheriae is a Gram-positive, aerobic, nonmotile, toxin-producing, rod-shaped bacteria belonging to the order Actinomycetales, which are typically found in soil, but also have pathogenic members such as streptomyces and mycobacteria."
As the parent of a child with autism, the "vaccines cause autism" crowd triply annoys me.
1. They take funding that should go to diagnosis/treatment and send it to Yet Another Study that will yet again show no link. (Or worse: Advocating "treatments" that are a baby step shy of torture.)
2. They fear monger autism such that you'd think your child would be better off dead than autistic. I know plenty of parents of kids on the spectrum. Some with pretty severe issues. None would rather their kids were dead.
3. They make it hard to support autism societies because you need to first weed out the ones dedicated to "proving" an autism-vaccine link.
The sooner these people accept that autism and vaccines have no link, the better for everyone.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.