As we speak, several children lie gravely ill in Minneapolis, struck down by a preventable but sometimes fatal childhood disease.
One of the children is an infant who was too young to have been vaccinated, but caught the disease, apparently, from someone old enough to be vaccinated but who was not.
Get your children vaccinated.
Learn about measles here. Read about vaccination here.
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
This makes me want to punch some ignorant anti-vaxer in the mouth, or have them arrested on charges of willful child neglect.
NewEnglandBob, there are ways to deal with those feelings. In my case, I regularly frequent both Respectful Insolence and Science-Based Medicine, where a steady supply of anti-vax slime (including Dr. Jay Gordon) come around to get some (but far less than their share) of justly deserved abuse.
Seriously, if you want to help these children, give them water and do not force feed them. Skip the fever reducers, they cuase massive problems and complications. I have had measales, big deal, at least these children will get guarenteed lifetime immunity.
Also there is a new strain going around that is vaccine resistant.
Look up Ohio CDC around 2008
Measales, its not even fatal in 1:100,000 + cases. side effects are even more rare.
Not much worse then the chickenpox actually.Aside from the 104-105 fevers which should be left be and treated with cool baths above 104.7
No Asprin of other fevor mediators. Water/formula.
jesus, when did measales become such a big deal ? It was mostly just annoying.
Greg, I’ve got to hand it to you. You do draw the live ones:
Assuming that they live and aren’t left deaf, blind, or brain damaged. In that case they’ll be immune to a disease (at least until they’re 50 or so) that ideally isn’t in widespread circulation. Great tradeoff, that.
Here’s Roald Dahl’s experience with childhood measles:
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/03/roald-dahl-on-vaccin.html
Then there’s SSPE — a real fun one, that.
Case mortality over the last 20 years in the USA is 2/1000. In places that don’t have ready access to ICUs it goes up to as much as 30% (USA in the early 20th century case mortalities run up to 10%)
Side effects such as deafness and blindness? Blindness case incidence is 3%. Deafness similar.
Funny, that’s not the way I remember it, and it’s been more than fifty years. Nor, in a recent conversation with my mother, does she remember it that way. Then again, she lost family members to measles in the 30s.
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally â?? nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide.
In 2008, about 83% of the world’s children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services â?? up from 72% in 2000.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/
thats out of 7billion humans. those number are reffered to as statistically anomoulous. less then %0.001 of the population is effected
More people die of malnutrion everyday “which is likely the underlying factor for the mortality rate of measales” in most thrid world countrys. Its natural population control.
a 78% reduction would imply that we 260,000 deadly annual cases globally. Hardly anything to be concerned about.Death by measales is extremly rare. If our tampering with our global biology create some sort of super strain by drowning out the weaker more prevelant strains, is vaccination really worth it then ?
AntiVaccine, that amount of misinformation is appalling. Measles fatality rates vary from 0.1% to 34%, depending on conditions (hint: they’re lower in countries with better vaccine compliance). Complications other than death run about 30%, even in the U.S., with a hospitalization rate around 20%.
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4/F3.expansion.html
@ anti: 10 seconds of google scholar turned up this paper published in the journal of the American academy of paediatrics.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/76/4/524
from the abstract: “In this period [20 years after introduction of vaccine] it is estimated that vaccination against measles has prevented 52 million cases, 5,200 deaths, and 17,400 cases of mental retardation”
The reported death rate was 1 in 10,000, 1 in 3,000 with mental retardation.
thanks to vaccination most people don’t die from it. we don’t even get it. vaccination remains the most effective way to deal with these diseases.
Oops, my numbers appear off. I am more inclined to trust Stephanie Z’s data, mostly as it is newer.
the WHo shows much lower rates of both infection and death per case.
for some reason the posting is stuck in the adminstrative que where I linked the data.
secondly, measales is only fatal where malnutrition is a prominent feature and clean drinking water is scarce.
I have had it, its not a big deal. also the potential tampering with the planets biological structure may not bring the benefits that are claimed and the death rate was minscule. If you figure at least 30-4% of the Us population prior to the MMR was at some point infected. the numbers are infentesimally small.
More people die from the seasonal flu.
you can’t prevent death, you can improve life span and you can enhance quality of life. My primary objection is that we are setting ourselves up by weeding out weaker virus’s on the lng haul allowing more powerful and deadly ones to take hold.
also our methods of delivery of vaccines need some review, they bypass all the normal learning and alerting channels of the immune response which makes them questionable in terms of design.
Aunty:
Your fear of vaccines allowing more deadly virus’s (sic) to take hold is nonsense.
Your concern about vaccines bypassing the normal learning channels of the immune response is nonsense.
Anyway, why should anyone pay attention to a troll too stupid to use spell check?
30-4%? Is that 26%? Or did you mean 30.4%? Either way, you need to learn to do sums.
Population of US is ca 310,000,000.
Incidence of measles is (to take your lower figure) 26%.
Cases in unvaccinated population, therefore, 26% of 310,000,000, that is 80,600,000. Divide by average lifetime, say (conveniently) 80.6 years gives us 1,000,000 cases a year.
Fatalities from measles in the U.S., let us take the lowest figure of 0.1%, or 1 in 1000, would then be 1000 deaths per annum.
One thousand deaths a year is not infinitesimally small. and 30,000 children with complications ranging from deafness to brain damage ain’t peanuts either.
Go get an education.
“I have had it, its not a big deal.”
Well I’ve been in a head-on collision and survived, so those aren’t a big deal either.
Antivaccine, just how stupid are you?
Antivaccine, you have violated blog policy.
This hysteria is rediculous. Produce the actual real people who have suffered this injury 30,000 cases with complications with potentially 1000 deaths and I can show you people who have the same long term health problems with the flu.
BTW I would like to see those numbers with the amount of fever reducers and other medical suppresants injected. Becuase blindess/deafness etc where all excedingly rare complications from measales prior to the day and age of modern medicine.
When I had measales my grand mother who was 60 at the time grabbed my from my parents home, took me to her house and gave me water and cool baths.
the problem with suppresants is a well known factor in complications with measales.
You people don’t get it though. We are messing with the microbiology of our ecosystem in ways we don’t truely understand and the side effects long term may massively outwiegh the benefits.
If you want to advocate for vaccines then define the hereditary traits etc that exist in the population for those who get a high rate of measales complications and innoculate only that group.
But we will soon face a problem wherby removing natural selection from the species survival model will squarely bite us in the ass.
So now, rather than saying measles doesn’t cause death or sterility (or disability that reduces the likelihood of reproduction in some other way), you’re advocating for measles on the basis that it does?
What I am suggesting is that we are interferring with natural selection and benifical and non beneficial mutation propogation model, ignorantly at that. A model we do not truley understand on a long time scale.
Let look at this from 1 of two ways.
Firstly let me state that there is a thing called acceptable loss’s. the population is not and has not headed in a negative direction since the invention of antibiotics ” which the liberal use of is now cuasing problems in term of microbiology”
If I am correct and we mitgate natural selection through immunization. My hypothesis states that we create a world of virally sucepstiable people. We are also going drive virus mutation. What ineviatbly happens is that a super bug, etremly hard to vaccinate for “if not impossiable comes along. some that can be transmitted by aerosol, blood,urine, etc. it wipes out all but maybe the 10-20% of the population that is not immunized and has a natural resistance.
If I am wrong. a couple of million people a year die.A amount we can easily spare.
Which is the greater evil ?
Anti, your understanding of evolution is suspect, and your callous attitude towards the death of millions is disgusting.
Sam M, thats the difference between leaders and sheep.
Millions of people die everyday from old age, should we vaccinate for old age ? There is a finite amount of resources and a expenonetial number of people. Should we kill them off to preserve resources or face extinction ?
At what point does your overtly emotional driven decision process give way to what is obviously apprent to anyone looking.
Grow up.
Grow up ???
I think the most of the people here are more in touch with the real world than you are anti vaccine.
Really your grannies folk medicine is presented as empirical evidence??
All you have presented are
Anecdotes
Cherry picked or misrepresented data to support your distorted view of the world.
A sociopathic view of your fellow humans bordering on psychopathy.
Misunderstanding of basic immunology and pharmacology that a 12 year old could get right.
Is that the best you can do???
You have not made one valid or credible point in the discussion – and I have watched the language and ideas get more aggressive and delusional with each post –
I watched you get shut down on the other blogs you befoul – here’s hoping.
you know it’s been alot of fun stirring you pro vaccine idiots up. but before you start belittling the antivaccine advocates, you should check your own evidence.
did you know today right now you can buy off the shelf medications that can cuase death, rectal bleeding,ulcers,rash, respirtory distress etc etc etc.
I don’t even have to make it up becuase its all true.
but you trust the same folks with your immune system and the future of the microbiology of our planet?
I geuss if you tell enough lies they become truth. Maybe some of the anti vacciners will take you more seriously when actually provide real studys with real data with real control groups and real control group sizes with real exsposure intances.
the narrow data sets you belive are proof now would not meet true scientific scrunity. It doesn’t matter how many holes are proven to be in your thoerys about disease prevention, you’ll continue to belive becuase Faith is important for you.
Geez, the brain-dead anti-vaxxer is infesting over here, too.
av @ 20:
The pity for you is there isn’t one for intelligence.
Face it. You know you aren’t too bright. We’ve all figured out that you aren’t too bright. Now you’ve provided the world with all the evidence they need that you aren’t too bright. But keep digging that hole, sport! In difficult times, comic relief is a necessity.
It’s just too bad you don’t know you are the joke.
The only thing that you stir in me is despair that so much delusion still exists in the 21st Century.
That any idiot with access to a website can spread disinformation and outright lies and people like you lap it up. I am sure it feeds some psychological deficit in you –
Its a pity that you don’t have the education required to understand the biology, physics, chemistry and statistics required to make an argument, rather using the same old tired regurgitated snippets gleaned from all the other crank websites out there.
Seriously do you actually understand any of the terms you are using?? The structure of your argument would suggest not – did you go to school at all?
Perhaps you could cite some real evidence for the claims you make and explain to those of us who actually use science for a living where we are going wrong.
We can almost document which websites the ant-ivax losers frequent from the copy and paste quotes.
So so sad.