11 Cases
February 16, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
11 children in the San Diego area have now been diagnosed with measles and one more child is being tested, according to today’s Sign On San Diego. All of the 11 children who have been confirmed to have measles were not vaccinated, either because they were younger than one year old (the minimum age for the measles inoculation) or because their parents did not have them vaccinated:
School leaders, health officials and physicians say they hope the outbreak will persuade parents to have their children inoculated against measles, mumps and rubella. They said the vaccine is safe.
However, a growing number of parents are exercising their right under California law to decline vaccination for their children. They fear that vaccines may be linked to autism.
Sign On San Diego describes the not-easy-to-trace path by which the measles was spread.
We know a lot of people around here who do not vaccinate their children. It never really bothers me until you begin to hear stories like these.
I saw some glib and snarky comments about this out break on a mercury parent bulletin board. The commenters noted how they or someone they knew had had measles and it was no big deal. But they missed that the baby who was at the center of the story was HOSPITALIZED because of the measles that it was too young to have been vaccinated for.
That’s why we should try to keep up the “herd immunity”.
My mom had measles and was fine, I don’t know how strict they were back then with vaccinations. A friend of mine also had measles as a baby, and almost died of the complications, and developed meningitis afterwards too. This was in another country, if she had lived in our country already as a baby, she would have been vaccinated too.
Since not all cases of measles are as easy as my mom’s, and you definitely very easily die of the complications, even today, even if you go to hospital very early, vaccinations are very important. You can’t know in advance if your child will be one of those to suffer very little from measles, or be one of those to come near death.
Despite being vaccinated, I did get the mumps. Perhaps before vaccination, I don’t remember that well.
I also remember kids my age in our village, who had become disabled because of contracting all kinds of diseases that the rest of us were vaccinated for (including polio, which may not be as eradicated in modern countries as some people like to believe), because they were not vaccinated for religious reasons.
Mostly I put the anti-vaccine militants out of my mind. It is in essence a religious belief that can’t be shaken. But last week at Schwablearning.com, Dawn2000K took vaccine hysteria to new heights:
http://www.schwablearning.org/message_boards/view_discussion.aspx?thread=26401
http://www.schwablearning.org/message_boards/view_discussion.aspx?thread=26625
http://www.schwablearning.org/message_boards/view_discussion.aspx?thread=26715
I guess I had a background of irritation about the whole “my children are too precious to vaccinate” mindset when I read about the measles outbreak in San Diego.
Here’s what I think:
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2008/02/measles-outbrea.html
I’d like it if the parents of the infants too young to vaccinate who suffered economic harm from the outbreak could sue the parents of the index case to recover their costs.
When a causative agent becomes the super-cause for everything—–starts to make one a bit suspicious about the claims made about it!
I think to give perspective, it is interesting to go back to archived material starting from the 40’s and reading forward from popular press sources such as at Time, where they talk about “Measles years”, the contagiousness of measles among the unvaccinated (higher than smallpox) and the complications of bronchialpneumonia, encephalitis, meningitis, severe ear infection which have potential for deafness and corneal complications which have potential for permanent blindness.
Description and statistics indicate that the majority of folks who contract measles will be suffer something similar to a severe flu, but the complication estimates range, even in Western Countries with good hygiene range from 7-18%, and as Norah noted, it is not necessarily predictable who will develop complications although infants and those who are immunocompromised at at higher risk, partially as a function of not being able to be immunized and dependent on herd immunity.
It was interesting to read that there have historically been various waves of vaccination resistance in the UK, Denmark, Nigeria, and Japan for reasons of philosophical differences, vaccination fear and complacency and at the point where the herd immunity has dipped sufficiently, there has been a subsequent resurgent outbreak of contractable diseases, significant death counts and then public demand for more vigilant vaccination programs.
So people may pooh-pooh or disparage the need for vaccination and we can run the social experiment to see whether we have a similar experience to the other countries.
Another factor that people should bear in mind that air travel allows one to go to those places which may not have comprehensive immunization programs, and that air travel has the capacity to transport active cases from one place in the world to another. This seems to be borne out in the San Diego outbreak and the woman in Hawaii who also contracted measles in Europe.
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From the WHO:
345,000 Number of people worldwide who died of measles in 2005, down 60% from 1999, beating a goal set by the United Nations
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I had the mumps when I was 8, back in 1964, before there was a mumps vaccine available. I contracted encephalitis as a complication of the mumps. I was relatively lucky: it killed the auditory and vestibular nerves on my left side, but nothing else. I am stone deaf on my left side, compensate with vision for the lack of vestibular input (my brain having learned to notch out the usual right-side signals), and am vulnerable to attacks of vertigo if anything like an inner ear inflammation changes the pattern of signals from my right vestibular nerve (that my brain has learned to notch out).
I think anyone who does not vaccinate against the serious childhood diseases is taking a foolish risk.