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?
Measles is also undergoing genomic shift. As is Mumps. Just like pertussis. The closer you get to 100% vax rates for any given disease the more likely you are to see genomic drift.
We got very lucky with smallpox. It’s amazing that since we wiped out smallpox with vaccination (and not even 100% vax rates either) we have been not only unable to do the same with *other* disease like measles but are falling behind the evolutionary curve with ‘ordinary’ things like pertussis.
We’re better off learning to *treat* diseases. All biological warfare is really chemical warfare. If we fight the bugs, they always fight back with genetic drift. Always.
I didn’t hear the ‘better off having the disease’ from an anti vax website. I actually heard it from a former coworker (A PhD/MD) who interned at a prestigious agency in Atlanta (not cdc btw, even more prestigious than that). Vaccine immunity wears off much faster than disease immunity. Known fact. It’s why they’re having to re-vax huge segments of the population with tetanus. And teens with the chickenpox vaccine. Said former coworker burst my vaccine trust bubble in a big way. He was VERY much against the HepB mandate for neonates. His fear was resistant strains. Taiwan has been vaxing for 20+ years as a standard newborn treatment. Already 25% of the HepB infections there are ‘vaccine resistant’ strains. That number was ~7% when they started the program. Like Jeff Goldblum said, ‘life happens’.
There’s scuttlebutt that we’ll all have to get the MMR(V) as well. Little birdy tells me that measles immunity might max out at about 10 years for enough people that we will have to be revaxed at some point in our adulthood. Possibly multiple times. If true, then our ideas of ‘herd immunity’ will have to change. Those ideas were based on a herd of disease immunized individuals. Not vaccine immunized individuals. T1 and T2 are different responses.