http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahael...rld-after-all/
Most people have heard by now that two dozen individuals who visited Disneyland between Dec. 15 and Dec. 20 have fallen ill with measles, which means they were almost certainly exposed to someone at the theme park with the disease. Measles is one of the most highly contagious diseases humans can catch. Ninety percent of people without immunity who are exposed to the disease will catch it – even if they visit a room two hours after the infected person has left.
That level of infectiousness is particularly concerning considering how many children visit Disneyland who are too young to be vaccinated, such as this child, whose family may lose a month’s worth of wages even if their child never ends up developing measles. Two of the Disneyland cases were too young to be vaccinated – the first dose is recommended at 12 months – so those parents never had the choice to protect their children from measles. Other parents’ decisions not to vaccinate their children made that choice for them.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/edito...116-story.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/disneyla...vaccine-trend/What has kept this from becoming a nightmare scenario so far is the fact that most Americans still do the right thing; they continue to be vaccinated. That "herd immunity" of the vast majority protects the vulnerable — those too young to have been inoculated, or people with medical conditions that make vaccination-risky, as well as the few who receive the vaccine but don't derive immunity from it.
But that protection is being eroded as the anti-vaccination movement grows, laying the groundwork for ongoing and bigger outbreaks — even though the risks associated with the vaccine are rarer than the risks associated with the illness. Getting vaccinated is good for the health of the inoculated person and also part of one's public responsibility to help protect the health of others.
The prospect of a new measles epidemic is disturbing. So is the knowledge that many ill-informed people accept a thoroughly discredited and retracted study in the journal Lancet that purported to associate vaccination with autism, and that others mumble darkly about mercury in the inoculations. The kind of mercury that used to be in vaccines was ethylmercury, which is eliminated from the body quickly, not the truly dangerous methylmercury. In any case, the measles vaccine no longer contains it.
The fear is spreading beyond California. One victim traveled to the Seattle area for the holidays, flying there and back to California on two different airlines. The woman in her 20s is not vaccinated, and she is the latest example of a controversial trend.
Health officials now say 26 cases of measles in four states have been linked to visits to the park in mid-December, reports CBS News correspondent Carter Evans. Of those infected, more than half were not vaccinated.
"Around the world, we've seen big outbreaks of measles. ... There's more of a chance of the virus coming to us," said Dr. Matt Zahn, medical director of Orange County Health Care Agency. "The other issue that we know is that some communities are certainly seeing immunization rates drop and so there's a combination there of risk factors."
Here in the U.S., measles infections have skyrocketed. More than 600 cases were reported last year, the highest number since 2000. The virus is highly contagious and can take up to 12 days to show up. Symptoms include cough, fever and a rash. The resurgence of this disease, once believed to have been eliminated, has doctors concerned.
Congratulations to you anti-vax evangelicals - you wanted sick babies, you got sick babies. If you had consciences, you'd be ashamed.
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