I’ve been to Africa. You can’t compare the condition of a 3rd world village with mud huts, raw sewage in the streets and contaminated water and malnourished kids sleeping on dirt floors to average American suburbia. After the invention of antibiotics, water trap toilets, septic systems and municipal water supplies the measles death rate in this country plummeted. Strangely, the data the CDC (and our ex pediatrician) used for measles deaths was in an african village in west africa.
Wild type measles, in our current social state, scares me a whole lot LESS than a bioengineered measles virus (easy to do with about $10K of supplies and a college lab somewhere) that we’d *all* be susceptible to. And yet, it would be at LEAST six months before there was a vaccine for the ‘new and improved’ measles virus. Countless deaths and disruption from such a scenario. Because we’d rather vaccinate than learn to treat. If most *healthy* kids got measles and we were able to *treat* those who had problems we’d BE healthier and have MORE money to spend on things we can NOT vaccinate out of existence.
Several studies point to a link between a girl having mumps PRIOR to puberty as being PROTECTIVE AGAINST having ovarian cancer later in life. The vaccine? Not so much. What’s wrong with insisting all kids GET the mumps. If they haven’t had it or a positive titer by puberty THEN get the vaccine.
Instead of chasing non pandemic diseases and spending billions of dollars on questionable vaccine mandates (universal hep b for neonates including those not at risk? really? that’s a billion dollars a year set on fire in the back yard! 90% of those kids have completely lost their immunity by puberty. When they DO have a higher risk of contracting hepb) why not spend that money looking for ways to *ameliorate* the bad side effects of viruses that really DO cause problems. And still do.
Like pertussis. Which has mutated from the wild type used in the vaccine to a new kind that has 10 TIMES the mortality and morbidity of the old version. Not happy with just mutating antigenic proteins, it’s also mutating the virulence portion as well.
Oh, did you catch the ‘mutate’ part? You can get a TDaP every single week of your life and STILL not have immunity to the ‘new and improved’ pertussis. Lovely that. Very little testing of all the recent pertussis outbreaks have been genomic in nature. And *most* of the kids have been immunized. Most of those completely.
‘vaccine escape mutants’ is an interesting pubmed search. If you’re a geek.
Measles deaths decreased in the US because of better healthcare. Better sanitation, etc., did not affect the incidence of measles because it is transmitted through the air. The incidence of measles decreased when a vaccine was made available. Unfortunately, because of the plethora of anti-vax activists these days, the vaccination rate is dropping and more people are getting measles. In the US, measles kills about 1 out of 1000 of its victims, and there is a chance of permanent brain damage in survivors. Worldwide, a couple of hundred thousand die of measles every year.
You are right, you cannot compare health outcomes between third world hellholes and the US. Children who are starving, malnourished, and living in dirty conditions sometimes do not respond to vaccinations even if they receive them. They are also more likely to die when they acquire an infectious disease; I believe over 6 million children below the age of five die every year. While that situation is tragic and horrible and desperately needs to be corrected, discussing the health care challenges of Africa or Asia really is outside the scope of this thread.
The idea that you will somehow be more healthy by getting the disease than getting a vaccine to prevent it may be popular on anti-vax websites, but it really has no factual basis. Some vaccine-preventable diseases cause permanent disability. Brain-damage, limb deformity, deafness, blindness: all can be caused by diseases whose absence we now take for granted. Some polio survivors lived out their lives in iron lungs because polio destroyed their ability to breathe... what kind of life is that?