Posted on 07/31/2008 7:22:31 AM PDT by yankeedame
The measles, whooping cough and even polio have returned. Why? Because of a new breed of vaccine deniers who are ignoring campaigns for awareness, and ultimately might live shorter—not longer—lives.
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Illustration by Koren Shadmi
Published in the August 2008 issue.
Progress is easy to take for granted. When I was a child in the ’60s, polio was history, measles was on the way out, and diphtheria and whooping cough were maladies out of old movies. Now these contagious diseases are making a comeback.
Take measles, for instance. The disease used to infect 3 to 4 million Americans per year, hospitalizing nearly 50,000 people and causing 400 to 500 deaths. In 2000 a panel of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaimed that measles transmission had been eradicated in the United States, except for imported cases.
But that caveat is important.
An unvaccinated 7-year-old from San Diego became infected with measles while traveling with his family in Switzerland and ended up transmitting the disease back home to two siblings, five schoolmates and four other children at his doctor’s office—all of them unvaccinated.
Whooping cough has also seen a resurgence: A school in the East Bay area near San Francisco was closed recently when some 16 students fell ill.
The reason for these incidents—and for recent outbreaks of polio—is that the percentage of parents vaccinating their children has fallen, perhaps because some parents see no point in warding off diseases they’ve never encountered.
Religious or new-age beliefs may also factor into the decision: The San Diego outbreak spread in a school where nearly 10 percent of the students had been given personal-belief exemptions from the vaccination requirement. The East Bay outbreak started at a school that emphasizes nature-based therapy over mainstream medicine; fewer than half of the students were vaccinated.
Why would parents refuse to vaccinate their children against dangerous diseases? Many are skeptical of modern science and medicine in general. (And it is true that most vaccines carry exceedingly tiny—but real—risks of serious illness or even death.) But I think most are responding to the widespread belief that vaccines are linked to autism.
Recent studies have soundly disspelled that notion.
And a simple glance at health statistics shows that autism cases continued to rise even after thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative widely blamed for the supposed autism link, was largely phased out of U.S. vaccines by 2001.
Nevertheless, these unsubstantiated fears have led some people to say that getting vaccinated should be a matter of individual choice: If you want to be protected, just get yourself and your children vaccinated.
Only it’s not that easy.
While the measles vaccine protects virtually everyone who is inoculated, not all vaccines have the same rate of success. But even if a vaccine is effective for only 70, 80 or 90 percent of those who take it, the other 30, 20 or 10 percent who don’t get the full benefit of the vaccine are usually still not at risk.
That’s because most of the people around the partially protected are immune, so the disease can’t sustain transmission long enough to spread.
But when people decide to forgo vaccination, they threaten the entire system. They increase their own risk and the risk of those in the community, including babies too young to be vaccinated and people with immune systems impaired by disease or chemotherapy.
They are also free-riding on the willingness of others to get vaccinated, which makes a decision to avoid vaccines out of fear or personal belief a lot safer.
Of course it is the very success of modern vaccines that makes this complacency possible. In previous generations, when epidemic disease swept through schools and neighborhoods, it was easy to persuade parents that the small risks associated with vaccination were worth it.
When those epidemics stopped—because of widespread vaccinations—it became easy to forget that we still live in a dangerous world. It happens all the time:
University of Tennessee law professor Gregory Stein examined the relation between building codes and accidents since the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York and discovered a pattern: accident followed by a period of tightened regulations, followed by a gradual slackening of oversight until the next accident. It often takes a dramatic event to focus our minds.
The problem is that modern society requires constant, not episodic, attention to keep it running. In his book "The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death 1700–2100" Nobel Prize–winning historian Robert Fogel notes the incredible improvement in the lives of ordinary people since 1700 as a result of modern sanitation, agriculture and public health.
It takes steady work to keep water clean, prevent the spread of contagious disease and ensure an adequate food supply. As long as things go well, there’s a tendency to take these conditions for granted and treat them as a given.
But they’re not: As Fogel notes, they represent a dramatic departure from the normal state of human existence over history, in which people typically lived nasty, sickly and short lives.
This departure didn’t happen on its own, and things don’t stay better on their own. Keeping a society functioning requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work by people who don’t usually get a lot of attention—sanitation engineers, utility linemen, public health nurses, farmers, agricultural chemists and so on. Because the efforts of these workers are often undramatic, they are underappreciated and frequently underfunded.
Politicians like to cut ribbons on new bridges or schools, but there’s no fanfare for the everyday maintenance that keeps the bridges standing and the schools working. As a result, critical parts of society are quietly decaying, victims of complacency or of active neglect....It’s not just vaccinations or bridges, either....
What do we do about this? To some degree, we have to do what the reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries did: Hector people about the importance of paying attention to our society’s upkeep.
Alas, our main allies in persuasion will probably be the epidemics and other disasters that take place when too few pay attention. Sometimes, people have to trip and fall to be reminded that it’s important to watch their step.
Don’t they implant the chips during the vaccination process?
//tin foil hat off
Then you are a very lucky person to have not had your children come into contact with diseased people.
I don’t think she is being being overly dramatic. It is true that mumps can make you sterile. And if your son gets the measles, it can be passed to the unborn child, even if the mother has been immunized herself.
I have an aunt (in-law) who got measles encephalitis before immunizations were available. she has been institutionalized for over 50 years. The immunizations are at least a hundred times less likely to cause this than the disease.
Two Words.........
ILLEAGLE ALIENS !
Phama companies don’t make squat on routine vaccines.
The patents ran out long ago.
Anti-vaccine whackos, however, get sick and make a lot of money for the phama industry.
where do you think he got the mono from?
folks, I will not bash anyone who does vaccinate their children, ever.
But I did my research on this issue, and I am very happy with my own decision- my children are very pleased also.
If you all are pleased with your decision, then God Bless you. I offer no words or thoughts of ill will whatsoever, and no assumptions on your IQ.
“Yes, you should listen to your betters.”
Can you teach me how to walk on water too?
It’s not too hard for his wife to have some blood drawn to see if she has the antibody titer for measles. I would suggest that pregnant women do this anyway, even if their husband hasn’t been vaccinated.
Immunizations wear off. She could very well think she is safe because she got the MMR, only to find out the hard way she wasn’t.
But then again, that doesn’t really play well with your melodramatic post does it?
Are we reading the same article? Or did you just want to hijack the thread and make it about illegal aliens?
Yea, there are THAT many illegals here.
By the very same princable the issue with a return of once unheard of diseases is very common here in Texas as it is all across the U.S. And it is always associated with unvaccinated illegals and their anchor babies convincing the 2nd and 3rd generation "hispanic" Americans that they don’t need the vaccinations. It is their "culture."
Links and quotes...
By default, we grant health passes to illegal aliens. Yet many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease.
Madeleine Pelner Cosman, MD, published in the spring, 2005 edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
http://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/cosman.pdf
America Welcomes Illegals' Contagious Diseases By Dr. Madeleine Cosman, Ph.D., ESQ
http://www.rense.com/general64/ill.htm
More...
http://www.gvnews.com/art icles/2008/03/29/news/news14.txt
The Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control published a report, easily obtained, regarding the diseases attributed to IAs (illegal aliens). Some of that report is as follows:
Tuberculosis: It had disappeared from the U.S. but has now returned in a more lethal strain killing 60 percent of those infected. One year's treatment costs more than $250,000.
Chagas Disease: Has no known cure and kills over 50,000 annually of the estimated 18 million infected. It takes nearly 20 years to manifest itself and then those infected have less than two years to live.
Leprosy: A scourge in biblical days was so rare in the U.S. that in 40 years only 900 people had been infected. In the past three years more than 7,000 new cases have been diagnosed.
Polio: Once considered eradicated in our country is now back and in growing numbers.
Cysticercosis: Caused by a rare brain worm that can be fatal and is spread primarily by unsanitary food handling practices. It was traced to IA's coming to our country.
Hepatitis A, B, and C: This disease is spreading rapidly and in 2003 just a few IAs working as kitchen laborers endangered 3,000.
“Can you teach me how to walk on water too?”
No, but I can teach you that if you try to walk on water, you will fall into the water.
Glad to see on your homepage, at least, that you and I agree that one person did, in fact, walk on water.
EVERY time I've hada flu vaccination, I've hada bad flu within one week. Every time I tell that to a doctor, they tell me it's impossible the vaccination caused it.
“I had the [chicken pox] vaccine as a child.”
How old are you? Did you grow up in Japan? That vaccine wasn’t widely used in the U.S. until the mid-1990’s. Mrs riverdawg and princess riverdawg were vaccinated in 1994 because members of many military families were in the early clinical trials.
One of the consequences of increased varicella vaccination of children is increased shingles among adults. I’ve had shingles, and it isn’t pleasant. But the annual death rate among children from chicken pox in the U.S. has been reduced by about 90% since the vaccine was introduced.
I’m not convinced about the merit of all available vaccines. I don’t get a flu vaccine (and I haven’t had the flu in 23 years), and we are not yet convinced that the HPV vaccine makes sense for princess riverdawg.
I dont think your points are unreasonable.
But, then again, you are not talking about the mumps, measles, diphtheria, diseases. For example, your kid isnt going to get HPV for a while—it is prudent to wait a bit on that one. Lyme disease, while a pain in the joints, is not as horrible as german measles.
Being educated and cautious is, well, prudent.
Waving your hand in the air and saying that all vaccines cause autism and NOT looking ou for your children (and those in the community) is not a good idea.
you’re wrong, though. Having had chickenpox is not necessarily protection against having it again (shingles) as an adult. A fact that I can attest to personally.
I do understand spreading out the vaccines, though. That makes real sense.
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