All those well-meaning parents so freaked out about the most minute of risks associated with very safe vaccines are making our children sick. Way to go, guys! All emphases mine.
Measles Is Back, And It’s Because Your Kids Aren’t Vaccinated
If you didn’t vaccinate your kids, you too could find yourself partly responsible for the resurgence of a disease thought eliminated in 2000
Measles—a highly contagious disease-causing virus—is making a comeback in the U.S., thanks to parents fears over vaccines. Fifteen children under 20, including four babies, have been hospitalized and 131 sickened by the red splotches since the beginning of this year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
The CDC had announced in 2000 that the disease was eliminated in the U.S. thanks to a vaccine that can completely control it. But fears of autism have led some parents to forego this treatment and at least 63 of the sickened children were unvaccinated.
Naturally this means that more than half of the sickened children WERE vaccinated, but the number of unvaccinated children undermined the herd immunity allowing susceptible, although vaccinated, children to become sick as well. No vaccine is 100% effective, but the higher the proportion of vaccinated children, the lower the risk that a susceptible child will ever come into contact with the virus that causes measles.
Peditrician Pauline Filipek of the University of California-Irvine told ScientificAmerican.com this spring that parents who don’t vaccinate their kids are putting the tykes at risk of long-forgotten diseases, like measles. What they’re not doing: preventing autism.
Many parents are squeamish about the potential to “cause” autism by having their children vaccinated. Unfortunately, this is based on bad science… or rather bad statistics. Sometimes even medical researchers need to be smacked and reminded that correlation does not imply causation. Most children with autism begin exhibiting signs of the disease around the age of two… or about the time they get their MMR vaccine. This does not mean, however, that the MMR actually causes autism.
Yet recently published research has not been kind to this much ballyhooed link. The results of several large American, European and Japanese studies demonstrate that although the rate of MMR vaccinations has remained constant or declined, the rate of autism diagnoses has soared. In addition, after the Danish government stopped administering thimerosal-bearing vaccines, the rates of autism continued to rise. These studies and others summarized by the Institute of Medicine suggest there is little evidence that vaccines cause autism. It is possible that vaccines trigger autism in a small subset of children, but if so that subset has yet to be identified.
So of all diseases why would measles be one of the first to rear its ugly head in the wake of declining vaccinations? For one, many wrongly believe that the MMR vaccine that protects children from measles is particularly linked to autism. The other main reason is just how contagious measles actually is.
Because the disease is highly contagious, it is the first to come back when vaccination falters. This is in part due to travel to other countries, such as Italy, Switzerland and the U.K., where similar outbreaks are occurring among children who have not been vaccinated. In previous years, such imported cases had petered out due to widespread vaccination but now the disease can spread.
But measles just makes you miserably itchy and feverish. Surely it’s not that big a deal…
It remains unclear whether vaccination levels overall are dropping or not, but at least 95 percent of children must be vaccinated to prevent measles from returning. The disease has become endemic to the U.K., for example, thanks to a vaccination rate that has fallen to 85 percent. Already one child has died in the U.K.
Prior to the vaccine’s introduction in the 1960s, as many as 4 million people came down with measles each year and as many as 450 died as well as 4,000 who developed permanent disabilities when the measles inflamed their brains.
It really comes down to how many children you would wish to die or become permanently disabled due to an almost entirely preventable (and cheaply preventable at that) disease. And if you think your child will be protected by the herd immunity if you do not vaccinate them, then think again. Your next door neighbors might have the same boneheaded idea.
Filed under: Education, Idiocy, Science | Tagged: Autism, Bad Parenting, Bogus Autism-Vaccine Link, CDC, Herd Immunity, Measles, MMR, Pauline Filipek, Thimerosal, Vaccines
Great post! Another thing that I don’t think was mentioned here is that some children rely on herd immunity because they have medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated. These children are at particular risk in situations where herd immunity is compromised and it is no fault of their own or their parents. They suffer due to other’s ignorance.
This is why people like Jenny McCarthy should be shut down when they start spewing their anti-vaccination garbage. To me, such talk is not protected speech and is akin to shouting FIRE! in a crowded theater.
The jokes on all the anti-vax people though because just wait until their kids try to get into college. I can tell you right now it just ain’t gonna happen without those shots.
You’re absolutely right and I should have specifically mentioned those children when I made the statement about the more children that are vaccinated the less likely a susceptible child will ever come into contact with the virus.
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I personally don’t think that it is vaccinations per se that are linked to autism but more of the combination of them and a gentic factor. Children are given a combination of 3 to 5 shots at spaced intervals of 6 12 and 15 to 18 months. A slower paced regeimin of these shots given ONE at a time might make a difference. But finding a doctor who is willing to follow this unorthodox protocol is hard to find and then nearly impossible to find single shots and not combos. My niece has severe autism, she started regression around the 15 to 18 month age same time as the MMR shot. I have watched the hardships they go through and for someoneto make a blanket statement about “It really comes down to how many children you would wish to die or become permanently disabled due to an almost entirely preventable (and cheaply preventable at that) disease.” makes me very angry. Until you have experienced this don’t take judgement on others.
The point isn’t to make people angry or to make light of autism. My family, too, has been touched by autism. The simple fact is that there is not sufficient evidence to claim that vaccines cause autism. The rates of these vaccinations have been going down, hence the return of some of these diseases. If the vaccinations were the cause, then the autism rates should also be going down, but they are not. The rates of autism diagnoses have been exploding. Admittedly, some of this is due to better detection by doctors, but that alone can not account for the tremendous growth in autism diagnoses.
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