Measles again...

[BTMO]

I see that measles is on the rise yet again in the UK (and probably elsewhere) and that deaths are predicted (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8068763.stm)and this is due to ... low vaccination rates (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8057508.stm).

Can anyone explain why it makes more sense to listen to someone like Jenny McCarthy (who is, admittedly, quite yummy eye-candy, but is not skilled in science or medicine) over doctors and scientists?

[dropzone]

I used to think Jenny McCarthy was yummy, but I know people who both grew up with her and hung out with her (and Michael Flatley, Mr Riverdance) in standard Southside (Chicago) Irish bars and it turns out, surprise-surprise, they are just trashy Southside Irish (I was raised Old-Country, pre-Potato Famine, Lace-Curtain Irish and am naturally :rolleyes: negatively judgemental, especially regarding other Irishmen ;) ). To hear my friends tell it, Jenny was cool, but dumb, and Flately thought he was (you'll be surprised) God's gift to WOMEN, of all people.

To me, now, she's an over-inflated woman with a lantern jaw who has sex with Jim Carrey. Any one of which is a potential dealbreaker, though I'm likely to make a personality-based exception with the second.

ETA: The deal was broken long before her vaccine-based killing spree. This is the difference between us Boomers and thems what came after: Folks like me remember Polio, and in the case of a lot of diseases they have vaccines for, we got immunized the Old Fashioned Way, with heart damage and partial deafness to prove it.

[MattusMaximus]

Sadly, there are a lot of people who listen to Jenny McCarthy precisely because she is yummy looking eye-candy. They see a young, attractive, wealthy, and successful woman and they want to be her (or nail her, or both). In addition, many young parents see a couple to whom they can relate when it comes to the fears & concerns that all young parents have with their children. Put it all together, and some parents think that forms the basis for a rational decision to not vaccinate their kids.

[Miss_Kitt]

Or, more precisely, it forms an emotional basis for a decision that they prefer not to evaluate on a rational basis.

[BTMO]

Folks like me remember Polio, and in the case of a lot of diseases they have vaccines for, we got immunized the Old Fashioned Way, with heart damage and partial deafness to prove it.


Yes... I remember a couple of people with "mild" cases of polio - they wore leg irons. To a small child, this was quite creepy, knowing that it was a pretty much completely preventable disease.

I also know that I had mild cases of chicken pox and measles as a kid. I assume I was vaccinated against them, and just got a mild strain, or didn't really suffer any serious symptoms from either - other than a few days off school.

I don't recall it being considered a dangerous disease as a child - which I now assume to be *because* of vaccination.

[lionking]

Folks like me remember Polio, and in the case of a lot of diseases they have vaccines for, we got immunized the Old Fashioned Way, with heart damage and partial deafness to prove it.
I remember polio, and how it was one of a parent's greatest fears. Now virtually eliminated.

[SezMe]

Agreed. My mom was a nurse and she went crazy whenever I got a cold, sneezed, or had sign of illness. She was just scared poopless. Only looking back can I understand her fears.

[ponderingturtle]

I see that measles is on the rise yet again in the UK (and probably elsewhere) and that deaths are predicted (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8068763.stm)and this is due to ... low vaccination rates (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8057508.stm).

Can anyone explain why it makes more sense to listen to someone like Jenny McCarthy (who is, admittedly, quite yummy eye-candy, but is not skilled in science or medicine) over doctors and scientists?

It is her mommy instinct. Who would dare to say she does not know what is happening with her own children?

[edd]

Jenny McCarthy is not well known in the UK. The AVers here don't even seem to agree with your lot over which vaccines are a problem or the mechanism. Low uptakes here and any resulting illness and death are more the responsibility of certain newspapers.

[casebro]

BTMO, I think chicken pox and measles vaccines are relatively recent. You suffered the usual course of those diseases. Generally, not much long term problems.

But what was the morbidity rate before vax? 1:10,000? Vs now, with vax- 1:1,000,000 ? That 100 times improvement is not significant to a particular child, but epidemiologists and 'big pharma' think it important.

[Cuddles]

BTMO, I think chicken pox and measles vaccines are relatively recent.

The general use of chickenpox vaccine is fairly recent, although it was actually first developed in the early '70s. The measles vaccine has been in use for almost 50 years though, so it's not really that recent.

You suffered the usual course of those diseases. Generally, not much long term problems.

But what was the morbidity rate before vax? 1:10,000? Vs now, with vax- 1:1,000,000 ? That 100 times improvement is not significant to a particular child, but epidemiologists and 'big pharma' think it important.

Before the measles vaccination was introduced, over 95% of people caught it before they were 18. The case mortality rate for measles in the US is 3/1,000. In undeveloped countries it can be as high as 1/3. I'd say that's pretty significant to more than just epidemiologists.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/377712?cookieSet=1
Measles vaccination was associated with a 36% decline in overall death rate and a 57% reduction in the rate of death directly attributable to measles or diarrhea, respiratory illness, or malnutrition in Bangladesh
Measles vaccination is one of the most cost-effective health interventions ever developed.

[Dancing David]

And there can be complications from the measles , even if you do live.

[Ivor the Engineer]

<snip>

The case mortality rate for measles in the US is 3/1,000.

<snip>

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

[Soapy Sam]

The sole place I have seen the name Jenny MCarthy is on this forum.
I just googled the name and found some tarty pics of a big bazonka'd blowsy blonde- is this the person to whom you refer? Apart from soft porn, what does she do for a living?

[Delscottio]

The sole place I have seen the name Jenny MCarthy is on this forum.
I just googled the name and found some tarty pics of a big bazonka'd blowsy blonde- is this the person to whom you refer? Apart from soft porn, what does she do for a living?

She does hard core porn for Jim Carey, In private which I can't figure if thats a good or bad thing :o

I am surprised more in the UK don't know of her, then again it may be just us of a certain taste...

[Delscottio]

Forgot to add the North East of England is currently going through its biggest measles out break for years, its been on the regional news alot. Hopefully it may have pushed a few more families towards the MMR vaccine.

[Niggle]

The deal was broken long before her vaccine-based killing spree. This is the difference between us Boomers and thems what came after: Folks like me remember Polio, and in the case of a lot of diseases they have vaccines for, we got immunized the Old Fashioned Way, with heart damage and partial deafness to prove it.

My aunt had polio when she was nine years old. I've never known her without the full-torso and leg braces. She went through the post-polio thing a few years ago and now can barely move one arm as well.

Whenever the anti-vax thing comes up, my dad goes ballistic. Damn right all my sibs' kids got their full vaccine schedules. But he was in a panic when he found out my older brother's kids got the live-vaccine polio dose. My brother wanted to be sure they got the higher level of protection. My father was sure they were going to be in the fraction of kids who actually contracted the disease from the vaccine (and so would my mother, who was immune-suppressed due to a liver transplant). He's always been a major pessimist. But in this case, I can understand his fear.

It might help if some of you eye-witnesses could find an outlet to show these idiot anti-vaxxers that there IS damage done from measles and all the other diseases they're so blithely dismissing. Jenny waves them away as a case of the sniffles. She can't wave away my aunt's braces. Yes, my aunt has been quite outspoken about the whole debate.

Maybe another website? The body count one can only do so much; all it shows is numbers. This needs to be personal. Show people the faces of those affected by these diseases so they can SEE what they're sentencing their children to by refusing vaccination.

She's not a scientist. She's making an emotional argument. Fight fire with fire.

I do not know how to make a website. I am willing to ask my aunt for a picture if someone else does know how to do that.

[Estellea]

Yes, Jenny is a non-entity in the U.K. MMR uptake was decreasing just prior to Wakefield's nonsense and then really plummeted after that media fiasco. They have never really recovered; although the U.K. aren't the only ones, the DACH has notoriously large clusters of vaccine refusers and the measles cases and exportations speak volumes.

[Professor Yaffle]

Forgot to add the North East of England is currently going through its biggest measles out break for years, its been on the regional news alot. Hopefully it may have pushed a few more families towards the MMR vaccine.

Yes, its very worrying for me, as I have a niece who lives in that area - she is just at the age when she would normally get the MMR, but she can't have it because she has to take immunosuppressants because she had a heart transplant. So she can't be protected by vaccination and has a weak immune system that might not be able to cope well if she did become infected.

[SRW]

Jenny McCarthy is not well known in the UK. The AVers here don't even seem to agree with your lot over which vaccines are a problem or the mechanism. Low uptakes here and any resulting illness and death are more the responsibility of certain newspapers.


By way of an Introduction to Jenny: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v_85tAey9s&feature=email)

[SRW]

I heard someone call whooping cough, A bad cough that last 10 days and then is mild after for a couple of months. They seemed to find that acceptable, and better than subjecting kids to a vaccination . As someone who has had whooping cough, I felt like reaching in and ripping her lungs out slowly over a 10 day period...

[edd]

I'm well informed of the ill informed but thanks for the link SRW.

In the UK for context the antivaccine movement is very focussed on MMR, and blames it all (from what I can tell) on the measles component, whereas the US AV movement is all about mercury and thimerosal.

Polio vaccines for example never come up as an issue. It's almost entirely focussed on the MMR jab in particular - it all stems from Wakefield and that man has an awful lot to answer for.

[MattusMaximus]

I would like to see Wakefield locked in irons and dragged into the public square for stoning based upon what he's done. What a scumbag :mad:

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I know it is of no use to argue with the forum's resident anti-vax medicine hater, but at least there is documentation:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106092

and
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/appdx-full-g.pdf

I took some of the data from Appendix G and made a list, the case fatality rate in the 1950s for measles was close to 1 in 1000 (I use this in blog posts so the underscores save me from a bunch of nbsp):
Year_Cases_Deaths__Year___Cases____Deaths
2000____86___ 1____1950__319124____468
2001___116___ 1____1951__530118____683
2002____44___ 0____1952__683077____618
2003____56___ 1____1953__449146____462
2004____37___ NA___1954__682720____518
2005____66___ NA___1955__555156____345
2006____55___ NA___1956__611936____530
Total__460___3 or more__3831277___3624

[casebro]

I guess that is due to better care of those who get sick. And is probably the reason for a slow decline over the intervening 45 years, missing in your chart? Rather than a sudden decline just after vaccine came into use?

And even in the fifties, chance of death was about 1:1000 of those who got the disease.

Personally, I wouldn't walk across the street to lower my chances of anydamnthing that's chances are only 1:1,000. Not to mention the risk of walking across the street. Car accidents kill 1:100.

ETA: So the "case fatality rate" went from 1:1,000 to 1:100? TEN TIMES WORSE?

[Dancing David]

There are other complications to measles.

How many children each year would get infected and need hospitalization? (A cost factors)
How many adults would also get an infection? (Sometimes happens)
How many people would suffer from prenatal exposure?


Measles
http://www.medinfo.co.uk/conditions/measles.html
Pneumonia / bronchitis 1/25
Fits (convulsions) 1/200
Meningitis / encephalitis 1/1000
(Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis) 1/8000 (if under agae 2)

(They do not give rates for the 'occasional eye problems')


Rubella

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/rubella/DS00332/DSECTION=complications

Up to 85 percent of infants born to mothers who had rubella during the first 11 weeks of pregnancy develop congenital rubella syndrome. This can cause one or more problems, including growth retardation, cataracts, deafness, congenital heart defects and defects in other organs.



Mumps
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mumps/ds00125/dsection=complications

Orchitis.
Pancreatitis
Encephalitis
Meningitis
Inflammation of the ovaries
Hearing loss
Miscarriage


Casebro:

Personally, I wouldn't walk across the street to lower my chances of anydamnthing that's chances are only 1:1,000.

I hope you reconsider that!
What are your daily cahnaces for that event? If it is daily then in 2.74 the odds will get very high that you will have the event occur.
Then this empidemiology say in the US you have 1,000,000 likely to suffer the event, that means 1,000 are likely.

[shuttlt]

Of course there's the problem of vaccination pushing up the average age that people catch the illness and altering it's severity to be considered.

[LarianLeQuella]

http://factsnotfantasy.com

[Deetee]

[blog pimp alert]
I've recently done a guest piece (http://layscience.net/node/579) on the Lay Scientist blog (http://layscience.net/) about the measles outbreak in Wales and the scurrilous opportunistic purveyors of single measles vaccine who are flocking into the region to flog their wares.

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

[blog pimp alert]
I've recently done a guest piece (http://layscience.net/node/579) on the Lay Scientist blog (http://layscience.net/) about the measles outbreak in Wales and the scurrilous opportunistic purveyors of single measles vaccine who are flocking into the region to flog their wares.

Note that you now have a special tag on that blog, meaning it is your own place on the internets.

Congratulations!

Though you have my deepest sympathy in that a now recently suspended doctor who is a loon is infesting the comments (more here: http://jabsloonies.blogspot.com/2009/05/cybertiger-vanishes.html )

[Jaggy Bunnet]

In the UK for context the antivaccine movement is very focussed on MMR, and blames it all (from what I can tell) on the measles component, whereas the US AV movement is all about mercury and thimerosal.

Polio vaccines for example never come up as an issue. It's almost entirely focussed on the MMR jab in particular - it all stems from Wakefield and that man has an awful lot to answer for.

Wakefield was undoubtedly responsible for a fall in take up. But what I don't understand is why the take up rate in England and Wales is so much worse than in Scotland (and I think NI as well). Much of the media is the same, but there seems to be a consistent (and widening) difference of more than 5%.

Maybe someone should be looking at what is being done differently to get better results and replicating it?

http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snsg-02581.pdf

[korenyx]

I heard someone call whooping cough, A bad cough that last 10 days and then is mild after for a couple of months. They seemed to find that acceptable, and better than subjecting kids to a vaccination . As someone who has had whooping cough, I felt like reaching in and ripping her lungs out slowly over a 10 day period...



Can I help? I had it twice last winter and I'm getting ready to get the booster so I don't get it again.

[Estellea]

I guess that is due to better care of those who get sick. And is probably the reason for a slow decline over the intervening 45 years, missing in your chart? Rather than a sudden decline just after vaccine came into use?There was a sudden decline after the measles jab introduction in 1963, or rather U.S. campaign for measles reduction, in 1966 (I can't post links yet so replaced t's with x's): hxxp://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/102/4/341.pdf?ijkey=68837a2d956207169144ff01f08c3da9b913 6d45 Figure 1. While mortality had had a slow decline due to the introduction of antibiotics to treat secondary illness, it too shows a sudden drop as well.

And even in the fifties, chance of death was about 1:1000 of those who got the disease.

Personally, I wouldn't walk across the street to lower my chances of anydamnthing that's chances are only 1:1,000. Not to mention the risk of walking across the street. Car accidents kill 1:100.

ETA: So the "case fatality rate" went from 1:1,000 to 1:100? TEN TIMES WORSE?The mortality rate from the 1989-1991 U.S. outbreak ended up being more than 2:1000 and death isn't the only significant endpoint as many children survived with permanent injury from measles encephalopathy and pneumonitis.

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

I guess that is due to better care of those who get sick. And is probably the reason for a slow decline over the intervening 45 years, missing in your chart? Rather than a sudden decline just after vaccine came into use?


That was hand typed because the file is a image pdf, so no copy and paste. I included the link to the file so that you could look at it yourself. I do have a slightly different version, which I will include at the end of this message. Edit to add: It was NOT a slow decline, it was a sudden one after 1963, and more decreases with vaccine programs (there is an issue getting everyone vaccinated).

ETA: So the "case fatality rate" went from 1:1,000 to 1:100? TEN TIMES WORSE?

Um, you need to look at the figures a bit more. In 1987 to 1991 most of the cases were in California, and were more often the poor, Pediatric hospital admissions for measles. Lessons from the 1990 epidemic (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=8855680). It is one reason for a push by county public health departments to buy and distribute vaccines to all, especially low income. I know that my state started a program of mailing reminders to anyone with a child born after 1992 (like my now 15 year old daughter).

Anyway, here is my other chart, and yes, it still is missing some years --- but you are welcome to go and read http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/appdx-full-g.pdf yourself:
Disease: Measles in the USA
Year__Cases___Deaths
1961__423,919_434
1962__481,530_408
1963__385,156_364
(^^ first vaccine licensed)
1964__458,083_421
1965__261,905_276
1966__204,136_261
1967___62,705__81
1968___22,231__24
1969___25,826__41
1970___47,351__89
1971___75,290__90
(^^^ MMR licensed)
1972___32,275__24
1973___26,690__23
1974___22,690__20
1975___24,374__20
1976___41,126__12
1977___57,245__15
1978___26,871__11
(^^^ Measles Elimination Program started)
1979___13,597___6
1980___13,506__11
1981____2,124___2

[Deetee]

Originally Posted by Cuddles http://forums.randi.org/helloworld2/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=4752671#post4752671)
<snip>

The case mortality rate for measles in the US is 3/1,000.

<snip>
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
US figures have been cited by HCN.
Since 1982: 156 deaths, 82877 cases (1 in 531)
I am sure these tell only part of the story. There may be undereporting of measles (how much?) Fatalities may be higher when the population is mostly vaccinated and relatively more cases are therefore occuring in under 1s and in adults.
But its still an impressive death toll, considering modern therapeutic interventions like ITU care etc.