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Measles outbreaks and fundamentalists


mirele

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Isn't there a whooping cough problem nationally? I know we get a commerical all the time warning about whooping cough here in Michigan but I have never really checked to see if it is a state or national commerical.

I had a puncture wound last month that required a tetanus shot and was given a shot that included a whooping cough booster.

The physician's assistant told me it's coming back in a big way nationally and it got started because of the refusal to vaccinate trend. It's mostly adults who are getting it of course, because their vaccinations have long since worn off.

So if you have any respiratory problems at all, you may want to consider getting the booster, especially if it's been decades since you were last vaccinated.

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My husband works in a hospital used to be exposed to whooping cough all the time, including the day before our daughter was born.

He was never exposed by an unvaccinated child, but by immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine.

I had the chicken pox and the mumps as a small child and the mumps put me in the hospital for 9 days with encephalitis and I nearly died.

My kids have had their vaccines on time for the most part. My son had chicken pox at 2 1/2 and I gave my daughter up until the age of 8 to catch chicken pox before I had her vaccinated. She will never get the Guardasil vaccine.

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My husband works in a hospital used to be exposed to whooping cough all the time, including the day before our daughter was born.

He was never exposed by an unvaccinated child, but by immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine.

Presumably they were illegal aliens because anyone immigrating to the US must be vaccinated for pertussis (whooping cough).

I gave my daughter up until the age of 8 to catch chicken pox before I had her vaccinated. She will never get the Guardasil vaccine.

Never say never. At 18, it becomes her call and she can be vaccinated up to age 26.

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JenniferJuniper, I have respiratory issues, and can't get vaccinated. If/when whooping cough gets near me again, I'll do what I did last time and stay home as much as possible until it's passed.

SealFan, if vaccines were to become vaccinated, as some people want, you may not have any choice about Gardasil. I just lost a friend over this issue. She believes vaccines are so perfect that it should be a felony to refuse to be vaccinated and that they are so safe that there really isn't anyone who can't get vaccinated, just people who can find doctors to say they can't. When I refused to rush in to get vaccinated, she ended out friendship. Apparently I, the very type of person "herd immunity" is supposed to protect (there are huge holes in the theory), am just trying to get a "free ride". She doesn't like Gardasil because she believes it's horribly sinful to have sex before marriage, but if she has a daughter, she said she will have her get it because she thinks it will guarantee her no cervical cancer, and if it doesn't, well it's completely safe so no bad can happen. All the girls who've had severe reactions and died she said all died from something else, every single one of them.

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If you feel vaccines are perfectly safe and highly effective, feel free to get them and think of yourself as protected and quite worrying.

I think someone who is sick with something contagious should stay the hell home. I lay blame for illnesses going around on those who know they're sick and still go out in public. And if something is going around, take extra precautions and stay home.

I'm immunosupressed and spend more time of each year sick than I care to admit and have learned to suck it up, and I can not get vaccinated anymore (near-deadly reactions twice even though I had no problem as a kid) and I support people choosing whether or not they vaccinate themselves and their own kids. No one has an obligation to have themselves or their kids injected with anything for my sake. The responsibility for my health and my family's health is mine and my husband's. Really, do we want the government to have the power to mandate that we all inject ourselves and our kids with anything they decide to, especially when vaccine-makers are judgement proof in court? Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

It's a slippery slope saying the government should have the power to mandate what we put into our own bodies. It's bad enough that we can't choose to smoke a joint of pot, but to say we much actively put something into ourselves would truly mean we are not free to even own our own bodies in this country. The risk of getting the measles is worth owning a little bit of our own bodies. We insult fundy men who think they have the right to decide on behalf of fundy women what happens with their bodies and what risks those women should take and that the women should have the right to decide for themselves.

Remember, I've got immune issues, and I can't get vaccinated. So don't try the "think of the people who can't get them, think of the people with autoimmunity," because that's me. When illnesses go around, I can stay home or I can go out, and when I'm sick, I stay home. People who are sick need to stay the hell home. Want to mandate anything? Mandate that someone who already is sick stay the hell home.

My children cannot have all the vaccines due to health issues. I do not feel for one second other people should get vaccinated to protect them. Strangers don't owe us anything. Just like I do not base our medical choices on other people. I don't see why I or the government should micromanage other people's medical choices.

Honestly the more I learn about vaccines, preventing illness etc the more secure I feel about the whole idea. Vaccination is great but clean water,waste disposal, isolation, hand washing are great ways to prevent illness.

I think we need to go back to common sense - someone shouldn't get fired if they stay home so they don't spread the flu. Parents shouldn't get calls from the school for excused days off while sick because they can only miss so many days a year. Thus encouraging parents to send sick kids back to school for the bus to make it's round again.

I wonder if illness rates in countries with more relaxed vaccine policies [with similar standards or better for water, waste etc] have more illness since it seems it's assumed the recent drop in vaccination of children is the only reason for the increase here in the US.

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Apparently I, the very type of person "herd immunity" is supposed to protect (there are huge holes in the theory), am just trying to get a "free ride".

So what exactly are the holes in the herd immunity theory? Peer-reviewed papers please...

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If you feel vaccines are perfectly safe and highly effective, feel free to get them and think of yourself as protected and quite worrying.

I think someone who is sick with something contagious should stay the hell home. I lay blame for illnesses going around on those who know they're sick and still go out in public. And if something is going around, take extra precautions and stay home.

I'm immunosupressed and spend more time of each year sick than I care to admit and have learned to suck it up, and I can not get vaccinated anymore (near-deadly reactions twice even though I had no problem as a kid) and I support people choosing whether or not they vaccinate themselves and their own kids. No one has an obligation to have themselves or their kids injected with anything for my sake. The responsibility for my health and my family's health is mine and my husband's. Really, do we want the government to have the power to mandate that we all inject ourselves and our kids with anything they decide to, especially when vaccine-makers are judgement proof in court? Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

It's a slippery slope saying the government should have the power to mandate what we put into our own bodies. It's bad enough that we can't choose to smoke a joint of pot, but to say we much actively put something into ourselves would truly mean we are not free to even own our own bodies in this country. The risk of getting the measles is worth owning a little bit of our own bodies. We insult fundy men who think they have the right to decide on behalf of fundy women what happens with their bodies and what risks those women should take and that the women should have the right to decide for themselves.

Remember, I've got immune issues, and I can't get vaccinated. So don't try the "think of the people who can't get them, think of the people with autoimmunity," because that's me. When illnesses go around, I can stay home or I can go out, and when I'm sick, I stay home. People who are sick need to stay the hell home. Want to mandate anything? Mandate that someone who already is sick stay the hell home.

The problem is that many of the diseases that we vaccinate against do not hit you initially when they are still contagious stage. Whooping cough in adults may appear as a cold. Measles may start out relatively benign.

Why do you see outbreaks?

It's not because these parents are sending pock marked kids to school. People may start out feeling fatigue and progress to fever and "not feeling well" before they realize they need to get home. A few hours in a crowded room with someone with measles could infect hundreds. It's one reason the measles vax is considered a required vaccination. For the majority of people, it's a relatively benign disease, but because of it's quick spread, a 1000 people could be infected within one afternoon which may result in 10 people headed to the ICU and a few fatalities. People in this country forget what life was like before vaccinations when polio and other diseases were rampant. Parents locked their kids up in fear of catching something deadly.

Parents aren't stupid. The people who spread them were not extremely sick when they present initially, but by the time they realize they need to be isolated, a dozen people could be exposed (who in turn exposes a dozen other people).

For someone like you with immune disorders, you are even more vulnerable because even an asymptomatic carrier could cause you a stay in the hospital. I've seen so many immunosuppressive and immuno-incompetent patients who come in septic from "harmless" things.

I don't believe in forcing everyone to vaccinate, but we must weigh out the greater health risks against individual choice. My boyfriend was severely ill as a baby when a kid visited their church who had the measles (but didn't know it until he left when he began showing mild symptoms). The kid was fine and played hockey during his stay so he would never have felt a need to "stay home", but my boyfriend was a baby and was not old enough to be vaccinated. He had to receive IVIG which is has far more side effects than an MMR shot. And if things got worse....well, you get a heck of a lot more shots in the ICU!

So yeah, just telling people to "stay home" when they "feel sick" doesn't remove the spread of diseases. I can't begin to tell you how many of my patients tell me they "felt fine" until their raging infections caught up with them. By the time they come to see me, they've already exposed children and the elderly to whatever they picked up.

What shows up as a benign course in healthy, immunocompetent adults can be fatal to those with weaker immune systems. Vaccinations save lives in very subtle ways and we really take it for granted.

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Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

Except that condoms only partially prevent the transmission of HPV. It seems like a better idea to get the vaccine to fully prevent against it than use a method that is considerably less effective.

I got this (very basic) sex ed info at http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv.htm

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When illnesses go around, I can stay home or I can go out, and when I'm sick, I stay home. People who are sick need to stay the hell home. Want to mandate anything? Mandate that someone who already is sick stay the hell home.

Illnesses are always going around. There is no possible way to know what you could be exposed to on a given day.

As far as the government mandating that sick people stay home, beyond the obvious issues concerning constitutionality, "sick" to one person might be a minor cold that lasts a few days while the same virus could lead ultimately lead to a fatal pneumonia in an elderly person. Further, germs are often spread before the person spreading them even knows they're coming down with something.

Individuals should be free to make their own choices. However, it is folly to deny how vaccines have saved millions upon millions. I don't want to return to a world where people around me are routinely dying from smallpox and typhoid or being crippled by polio or rendered sterile by the mumps.

In the past 10 years, 300,000 women world wide have died from cervical cancer. The National Cancer Institute estimates that cervical cancer deaths around the world can be reduced by as much as two-thirds if vaccination becomes widespread. Compare those figures to the very tiny amount of people that will have serious reactions to the vaccine.

If you believe you cannot be vaccinated for health reasons, it clearly should be your choice not to be. However, claiming that vaccinations are more dangerous than the illnesses they are preventing is flat-out wrong. And the notion that we'd all be fine if we just stayed home when we started sneezing is as impractical as it would be ineffective.

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If you believe you cannot be vaccinated for health reasons, it clearly should be your choice not to be. However, claiming that vaccinations are more dangerous than the illnesses they are preventing is flat-out wrong. And the notion that we'd all be fine if we just stayed home when we started sneezing is as impractical as it would be ineffective.

Preach. :clap:

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Do you have a link to this study? I have never heard this before and couldn't find it googling. TIA.

Here's one link to an article in a pediatric nursing journal examining studies in Quebec and California: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 152.x/full

and Acta Pediatrica article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 779.x/full

I had some better ones when I was in school, but I no longer have access to a lot of journals. If you do, "non vaccinated autism incidence" will probably get you somewhere.

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Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

Why is it either/or with condoms? There are lots of other things that only condoms can reduce the risk of. AND even then condoms aren't 100%. Why can't you allow the vaccine and allow proper sex education?

(I've yet to figure out why some people think that one vaccine that prevents one sexually transmitted disease means that people can and will sleep with everybody with no protection.)

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I think someone who is sick with something contagious should stay the hell home. I lay blame for illnesses going around on those who know they're sick and still go out in public. And if something is going around, take extra precautions and stay home.

Elle, what do you do when your family brings illness home to you? If your family is unvaccinated, you're at risk. My mother gets her flu shots because Dad has weird reactions and I don't want to risk them (being slightly immunocompromised myself). I have learned that quarantining myself and insisting on best sanitary practices only goes so far. What happens next is one of two things: my immune system puts up enough of a fight to keep me sluggish and off-and-on feverish, or I go down harder than anyone else in the family.

I would respectfully point out that many, many working-class people cannot afford to stay home when they're sick. Employers come down hard on those who look after their health, below a certain professional level. I also made a barely-living wage; had I moved out on that wage, it wouldn't matter what my employers thought. I'd have lost a significant chunk of my income for every working day lost. I'm appalled that I worked in a big room with people hacking and sneezing all over the place, but I'm not appalled at my co-workers. Company policies went directly against employees staying healthy.

Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

Now you're exaggerating. The CDC recommends, at the youngest, beginning at nine for both genders. Note also this sentence: "But HPV can infect areas that are not covered by a condom - so condoms may not fully protect against HPV."

The risk of getting the measles is worth owning a little bit of our own bodies.

The hell it is! Have another link: Why We Immunize.

So don't try the "think of the people who can't get them, think of the people with autoimmunity," because that's me.

Then do remember you're not a representative sample all by yourself.

I think we need to go back to common sense - someone shouldn't get fired if they stay home so they don't spread the flu.

Good luck convincing corporations of that. Bottom lines rule in the United States.

I wonder if illness rates in countries with more relaxed vaccine policies [with similar standards or better for water, waste etc] have more illness since it seems it's assumed the recent drop in vaccination of children is the only reason for the increase here in the US.

As a matter of fact, pretty much every travel advisory I read--to Eurozone countries, not to the Third World--mentions the uptick in measles and advises travellers to vaccinate before they go. I wouldn't be able to return to one of my own home countries without some extra shots.

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Guest Anonymous
If you feel vaccines are perfectly safe and highly effective, feel free to get them and think of yourself as protected and quite worrying.

I think someone who is sick with something contagious should stay the hell home.

I agree. If only employers felt the same way....

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If you feel vaccines are perfectly safe and highly effective, feel free to get them and think of yourself as protected and quite worrying.

I think someone who is sick with something contagious should stay the hell home. I lay blame for illnesses going around on those who know they're sick and still go out in public. And if something is going around, take extra precautions and stay home.

I'm immunosupressed and spend more time of each year sick than I care to admit and have learned to suck it up, and I can not get vaccinated anymore (near-deadly reactions twice even though I had no problem as a kid) and I support people choosing whether or not they vaccinate themselves and their own kids. No one has an obligation to have themselves or their kids injected with anything for my sake. The responsibility for my health and my family's health is mine and my husband's. Really, do we want the government to have the power to mandate that we all inject ourselves and our kids with anything they decide to, especially when vaccine-makers are judgement proof in court? Do we want the government to have the power to say we must put our daughters through three doses of Gardasil at the age of 8 instead of teaching them about condoms to protect themselves?

It's a slippery slope saying the government should have the power to mandate what we put into our own bodies. It's bad enough that we can't choose to smoke a joint of pot, but to say we much actively put something into ourselves would truly mean we are not free to even own our own bodies in this country. The risk of getting the measles is worth owning a little bit of our own bodies. We insult fundy men who think they have the right to decide on behalf of fundy women what happens with their bodies and what risks those women should take and that the women should have the right to decide for themselves.

Remember, I've got immune issues, and I can't get vaccinated. So don't try the "think of the people who can't get them, think of the people with autoimmunity," because that's me. When illnesses go around, I can stay home or I can go out, and when I'm sick, I stay home. People who are sick need to stay the hell home. Want to mandate anything? Mandate that someone who already is sick stay the hell home.

:clap: :clap:

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Do you have a link to this study? I have never heard this before and couldn't find it googling. TIA.

I've read that study (it links in with my profession anyway), I'll try and find a link to it.

Basically it's all down to interpretation, as are many studies in fact. Hell you can make statistics say what you want. But anyway, a significant number of the cohort studied had at least one child with autism who was vaccinated - usually the first child - they then, because of the autism/vaccination scare, didn't have subsequent children vaccinated. These later children also turned out to be autistic (quelle surprise). What the study is not taking into account is the genetic component of autism. Autism is highly heritable; if you have one autistic child you are more likely to have subsequent children on the spectrum. You are also more likely to have autistic traits (officially recognised or not) in yourself, spouse and/or siblings.

It's no surprise really that the study came up with higher rates of autism in unvaccinated children. When you ask questions like; Is your unvaccinated child autistic? You really should ALSO be asking, does you unvaccinated autistic child have older, vaccinated autistic siblings?

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Guest Anonymous

Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the age of vaccination around the same age that signs of autism are noticed by most parents, and that was one of the reasons behind the link between vaccines and autism? Seems like I remember seeing that somewhere.

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I live in a very liberal area with a lot of crunchy parents. I know a lot of parents who have chosen not to vax - ironically enough, one of those un-vaxed kids is on the spectrum and has a lot of health problems. But that is the parent's choice. I also know a lot of parents who delay vaccinations.

My husband and I had a brief conversation while I was pregnant. We decided that we were going to get our daughter her shots on time and she is perfectly fine. In fact, she rarely gets sick.

I do worry about the return of these deadly diseases because parents are making uninformed choices because they are afraid of autism. The child I mentioned above, his parents still believe very much that vaccinations do cause autism despite all the proof otherwise. But I don't think it's the government's place to say that we all need vaccinations or not.

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Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the age of vaccination around the same age that signs of autism are noticed by most parents, and that was one of the reasons behind the link between vaccines and autism? Seems like I remember seeing that somewhere.

Most first time auti-parents notice something is wrong about the time the baby begins to talk which is around a year to a year and a half of age. MMR is usually given at around 15 months of age so it's not hard to see why people thought there might be a link. Someone with experience of autism in the very young can see it in much younger children. In the UK there is a hearing test at 9 months and many autistic kids fail it. Both mine did and neither are deaf. Neither of mine were babbling at that age either. I have a friend who has autistic kids and I was convinced her daughter was autistic when she was just two weeks of age. The baby would not be held close and would arch her back and scream the place down if someone tried to hold her. At weaning the baby freaked out over the change and couldn't cope with textures. She failed the hearing test, didn't babble at 9 months. At 18 months my friend moved her into a bed as she was diving out of the cot, that night the by then toddler flipped and freaked out that much over the change that she vomited. She toe walked, hated her head being touched, was oblivious to anyone being around her and at 3 was diagnosed with autism.

If you know what you are looking for, autism can be seen in fairly young babies. But usually parents notice around 18 months of age.

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I've read that study (it links in with my profession anyway), I'll try and find a link to it.

Basically it's all down to interpretation, as are many studies in fact. Hell you can make statistics say what you want. But anyway, a significant number of the cohort studied had at least one child with autism who was vaccinated - usually the first child - they then, because of the autism/vaccination scare, didn't have subsequent children vaccinated. These later children also turned out to be autistic (quelle surprise). What the study is not taking into account is the genetic component of autism. Autism is highly heritable; if you have one autistic child you are more likely to have subsequent children on the spectrum. You are also more likely to have autistic traits (officially recognised or not) in yourself, spouse and/or siblings.

It's no surprise really that the study came up with higher rates of autism in unvaccinated children. When you ask questions like; Is your unvaccinated child autistic? You really should ALSO be asking, does you unvaccinated autistic child have older, vaccinated autistic siblings?

Sola, I guess there must be multiple studies demonstrating a lower risk of autism in vaccinated children, because the one I linked previously didn't seem to be run that way at all:

This latest study included 96 Polish children ages 2 to 15 who had been diagnosed with autism. Researchers compared each child with two healthy children the same age and sex who had been treated by the same doctor.

Some of the children had received the MMR vaccine, while others had not been vaccinated at all or had received a vaccine against measles only.

Poland has been slower to introduce the MMR than other European countries, but over the past decade, the vaccine has slowly been replacing the measles-only shot.

Overall, the study found, children who had received the MMR vaccine actually had a lower risk of autism than their unvaccinated peers. Nor was there any evidence of an increased autism risk with the measles-only vaccine.

I would think that any serious study would control for the heritability factor. Not doing so would be a pretty egregious scientific slip-up that would be caught quickly by other scientists. I'm interested in seeing the link to your study, if you find it; I'm surprised that a study like that would pass muster in the scientific community.

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That's not the one I read. The one I read wasn't Poland. Do you have a link, I'd like to read that one.

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That's not the one I read. The one I read wasn't Poland. Do you have a link, I'd like to read that one.

Unfortunately it's not a link to the actual study, but here's the news article I read.

It's kind of heartening that there seem to be multiple studies demonstrating the reduced autism rates in vaccinated children, even if some of them are potentially more reliable than others.

Edited to change "reduced autism risk" to "reduced autism rates," which is more accurate.

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Unfortunately it's not a link to the actual study, but here's the news article I read.

It's kind of heartening that there seem to be multiple studies demonstrating the reduced autism risk in vaccinated children, even if some of them are potentially more reliable than others.

I don't believe the Poland study is stating that receiving the MMR vaccine is directly related to lower autism rates (though I can't find the original study). The Reuters article says:

"The study does not answer the question of why vaccinated children had a lower autism risk. But one possibility, according to Mrozek-Budzyn, is that some children started showing potential signs of autism, or possibly other health problems, before receiving the MMR or measles vaccine. Doctors or parents may then have avoided vaccination."

I, too, work with children on the spectrum and worry that there is still the belief out there that the MMR shot is in anyway related to ASD. As of now, I believe the research shows that there is no link between vaccines and autism, whether it be an increase, decrease or otherwise. I worry that stating the MMR shot now decreases autism rates just continues to perpetuate the misconception that they are in anyway related.

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