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It would appear that deaths from measles took a header with sulfa drugs and another, bigger, one with antibiotics. It’s a shame we still don’t know how to treat measles. We might learn a great deal about virology in the process. It’s a really nasty bug. With a few mutations, easily performed in a college laboratory, it might even be a viable bioweapon. I wonder how easily the antigenic portion our vaccine strain recognizes could be altered. Or the virulence portion.

Vaccine tech is great but might lead to a false sense of security. Kind of like the Great Wall of China, with no reinforcements behind it. Plan A is great but Plan B is even more insurance. I guess I’m kind of wondering why, 50 years after the vaccine we still have no Plan B. How do we know the vaccine strain won’t evolve around our plans and sucker punch us?

I fondly remember the pronouncements from the 70’s that we were ‘over’ our fear of infectious diseases, that we had *won*. Right around the time we started seeing increasing numbers of antibiotic resistant cases of ‘common’ infections.