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US Is Slipping Toward Measles Being Endemic Once Again, Says Study (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With firm vaccination campaigns, the US eliminated measles in 2000. The highly infectious virus was no longer constantly present in the country -- no longer endemic. Since then, measles has only popped up when travelers carried it in, spurring mostly small outbreaks -- ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred cases each year -- that then fizzle out. But all that may be about to change. With the rise of non-medical vaccine exemptions and delays, the country is backsliding toward endemic measles, Stanford and Baylor College of Medicine researchers warn this week. With extensive disease modeling, the researchers make clear just how close we are to seeing explosive, perhaps unshakeable, outbreaks. According to results the researchers published in JAMA Pediatrics, a mere five-percent slip in measles-mumps-and-rubella (MMR) vaccination rates among kids aged two to 11 would triple measles cases in this age group and cost $2.1 million in public healthcare costs. And that's just a small slice of the disease transmission outlook. Kids two to 11 years old only make up about 30 percent of the measles cases in current outbreaks. The number of cases would be much larger if the researchers had sufficient data to model the social mixing and immunization status of adults, teens, and infants under two.
Autism rates have been on the decline, and this decline started when vaccination rates began their decline.
It has? Can you please give a citation or two? From what I understand autism rates have been steadily increasing for a while now. Though I've read a few sources that state it may be about to plateau.
Granted, part of the increase has to be from prior misdiagnosis and things like Asperger now considered autism. Black and Hispanics are also seeing increases. But some of that can be attributed to a lack of medical care in the past too. Regardless, it's still on the rise
It's my understanding that there are some special cases where vaccines may be harmful to a very small percentage of children, but it's nothing compared to how harmful hepatitis, tetanus, polio, etc can be if you contract those and are not one of those cases.
This isn't good enough for children with rare diseases and childhood cancers that don't allow them to get vaccination. Vaccination isn't just about my kid, it's a social policy designed to protect others as well.
It would be great if libertarian principles applied to vaccines (my base ideology is libertarian), but:
1. Vaccines are not anywhere near 100% effective, so even a fully vaccinated person may be relying on herd immunity.
2. You can't vaccinate a newborn, so everyone relies on herd immunity for the first 6 months or so of their life.
3. Some people can't be vaccinated at all.
So we're left with a social solution, which is vaccinating everyone who can be vaccinated, whether they like it or not.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm sorry, but you're probably mistaken. Thanks mainly to hospitals, where heroic measures can be taken to save the offspring of anti-vaxxer morons, the little ones won't die. They'll spread disease amongst people who cannot be vaccinated due to age or other factors, then be dragged by their idiot parents to the nearest emergency ward when they get really sick. Once there, it might cost many thousands of dollars to save each of the little darlings. For the most part, though, they'll avoid paying the price for their parents' bad decisions.
We will do that, with our tax dollars.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Essentially, that's it. Add to that a population dumb enough to take medical advice from Jenny McCarthy.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The problem isn't unvaccinated illegal aliens. The issue is a lot of parents in the US aren't vaccinating their kids because Jenny McCarthy and people like her scare them into thinking vaccines are evil. So, when people visit to/from places where diseases such as measels are still endemic they bring the diseases with them and spread them among the unvaccinated population here (a lot of whom tend to be clustered together since people with anti-vaccination beliefs tend to have certain other political or religious beliefs and live in communities with others who share those beliefs). Illegal immigration is a very small factor, if at all. And if the US and Europe would put in a proper refugee system, a lot of those people you mentioned would have proper medical screenings and be provided food, housing, and education/employment; allowing them to become productive members of a society they literally risked their lives for to join.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Medically - politically - I have to look at the calendar everyday because it feels like I'm in a time warp and it's really 1917.
We, the USA, are getting dumber.
One thing you have to realize is that political issues are never black-and-white, but there are shades of grey. Issues have both positive *and* negative aspects, and it is up to us to assign an inherent value to the plusses and minuses in each case.
Vaccination in the US is all tangled up with immigration and foreign culture.
Measles is brought in by travellers from foreign countries and spurred mostly by immigration - going to visit relatives back in the home country, or having relatives come to visit. Neither of which is a problem, but it adds a small negative value to unrestricted immigration.
A couple of years ago I read about some Islamic groups in Pakistan who intentionally avoided the (freely offered) polio vaccine, and also avoided having polio-laden children *treated*, thinking that if they could somehow get the children into the US they could attack us that way(*).
A few years earlier I read about a California school system with 7,000 students and only enough money for 5,000 vaccinations, but of those 7,000 students 1,500 were illegals. The controversy was about "who gets the vaccinations", and whether we should put tax-paying citizens at a disadvantage by vaccinating foreign nationals for free.
You could definitely say that people are stupid for not getting vaccinated, but you could also say that curbing immigration would help, immigration adds a burden of cost to our society, and that sometimes other cultures and practices will get in the way.
The stupid answer is to have unlimited immigration and also insufficient funds for vaccination. If we have unlimited immigration, we should absolutely be willing to bear the increased medical costs simply for the protection of our own people.
Whether unlimited immigration is worth the increased costs is now a political issue that you can judge for yourself, and perhaps we should poll the population for consensus. Take all the positives and their inherent value, and compare to the negatives and *those* values.
Vaccination is the correct choice, but it's become partly a political issue.
(*) And it didn't help that the CIA used foreign vaxxing programs as a way to locate and register persons of interest.
Evolution. All the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated will see their genetic line die off. Those with vaccinations will be OK.
Might work if these diseases were always fatal. Problem is that they aren't. They are only sometimes fatal. Sometimes carriers aren't even symptomatic. And they also can infect people who cannot get vaccinated for valid medical reasons.
I wouldn't have a philosophical problem with parents of children who choose not to vaccinate without a valid medical reason to have to live in quarantine. Separate them from the rest of the herd. Basically they are deciding to join a voluntary leper colony. This would keep them and their DNA from infecting the rest of us.
The numbers really don't support the idea that illegal immigration is a significant driver here. While it's always *possible* for someone to bring in measles, measles has an incubation period of about 10-12 days, so you only have to worry about the number of people who crossed the border illegally in the last week or so.
The total number of undocumented in the US is estimated to be around 11 million (useful fact to keep in mind in the immigration debate), two thirds of whom have lived here for a decade or more. By DHS's internal estimates, about 170,000 - 200,000 people annually cross the border illegally who are not caught.
Compare that to the number of Americans who travel abroad. Last year, that hit a record sixty-six million, twenty five million to Mexico alone. Since the vaccine has about a 2% failure rate, that means about 1.3 million non-immune Americans cross the US border legally every year, almost 10x the number of illegal immigrants. What's more Americans overwhelmingly fly in, which is significant given the incubation time of the virus. About 40% of illegal immigrants arrive by air, and these are overwhelmingly "overstays", people who enter the US illegally but overstay their visa. They are not "illegals" during the period they would be contagious.
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