measles

If there's one thing antivaccinationists hate having pointed out to them, it's that they are antivaccine. If you really want to drive an antivaccinationist up the wall, point out that they are antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccinationists who openly self-identify as antivaccine and are even proud of it, but most of them realize that society frowns upon them—as well it should given how antivaccinationists are responsible for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. Moreover, most antivaccine activists really believe that vaccines are harmful. They're wrong, of course, but that doesn'…
Apparently, there is a Faith Healer [who] Convinces Followers To Never Vaccinate, [and] Now Church [is] The Center Of Measles Outbreak The Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, run by Kenneth Copeland Ministries, has long been a strong anti-vaccination stronghold. Now, it is the epicenter of a major outbreak of Measles in the United States. And, here is a poll that asks: Should anti-vaccine parents be held liable if their child spreads an illness? Say an unvaccinated child has the measles and passes the disease onto a baby who’s too young to be vaccinated. If that baby gets…
Actions have consequences. No matter how much the person might want to try to hide from the consequences of one's actions, they frequently have a way of coming back, grabbing you by the neck, and letting you know they're there. We see it happening now in the U.K. Fifteen years ago, British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a case series in The Lancet in which he described gastrointestinal symptoms in 12 autistic children who were treated at the Royal Free Hospital. His conclusion was that he had identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of…
I want to thank Dan Olmsted, the editor of Age of Autism. I think. Why do I say this? After all, Olmsted is the managing editor of perhaps the most wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery that I am aware of. However, he's actually done me a favor. You see, the other day, the instigator of the U.K. anti-MMR wing of the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, posted a video to YouTube because he's really feeling some serious butthurt right now: Basically, it's Andrew Wakefield complaining about being blamed for an ongoing measles outbreak in South Wales. Of course, given that, if there…
This is the fifteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Cassie Klostermann.  One of the major accomplishments that public health professionals pride themselves in is the reduction of people getting sick or dying from preventable infectious diseases. Unfortunately, these debilitating, historic diseases that health professionals had once thought they had under control are starting to rear their ugly heads once again in the United States (U.S.). One of these diseases that I am referring to is measles. Measles is a highly contagious virus (from the genus Morbillivirus) spread through the air…
One month after some grossly irresponsible parents let their measles-infested offspring roam about the Super Bowl festivities, here is the end result:16 cases of measles I dont know about the last three, but the first 13 were unvaccinated:According to Larkin, the first 13 individuals infected had all chosen not to be vaccinated. Im sorry, but that statement doesnt jive with this one:State health officials have reported a total of 13 confirmed cases of measles in Central Indiana, involving children and adults. Children cannot 'choose' not to be vaccinated. If they could, the vaccine rate…
Sometimes, people do not respond well to vaccines. What I mean by that, is that sometimes a person will not generate a protective immune response to a particular vaccine on a given day... the whole point of vaccination. Now that person might respond (and have responded) just fine to other vaccines. Or they might respond to that exact same vaccine just fine on another day. Or they might get that same vaccine several times, and never generate a protective response. We do not know why this happens, thus we cannot predict who will or will not respond well. And then we dont know who responded…
Just to make this clear up front:WHAT I AM ABOUT TO WRITE ABOUT IS NOT A 'CURE' FOR CANCER. ITS A NEAT IDEA WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO CAPITALIZE ON IN THE FUTURE. ITS COOL! NOT A 'CURE'. Perfect example of the potential domesticated viruses have to tame deadly diseases!Tumor Cell Marker PVRL4 (Nectin 4) Is an Epithelial Cell Receptor for Measles Virus ... only the human tumor cell marker PVRL4 (Nectin 4) rendered cells amenable to measles virus infections... It is highly expressed on many lung, breast, colon, and ovarian tumors suggesting that they could be targeted with oncolytic measles virus…
As I've laid out this week (part 1, part 2, part 3), the realization that a fairly simple, toxin-carrying bacterium could cause a "complex" and mysterious disease like hemolytic uremic syndrome came only with 30 years' of scientific investigation and many false starts and misleading results. Like many of these investigations, the true cause was found due to a combination of hard work, novel ways of thinking, and simple serendipity--being able to connect the dots in a framework where the dots didn't necessarily line up as expected, and removing extraneous dots as necessary. It's not an easy…
We've had pertussis and mumps, so it was only a matter of time. State health officials declared a "public health emergency" Tuesday after a test confirmed a case of measles in an unvaccinated Dallas County baby who apparently picked up the disease in India. They said people who might have been exposed included passengers on an Americans Airline flight from Chicago to Des Moines May 11 and people who were at Mercy Medical Center or a Mercy pediatric clinic in downtown Des Moines May 14. Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, medical director for the Iowa Department of Public Health, said many Americans…
Maryn McKenna has an excellent post on 2008's measles outbreak in Arizona. 14 confirmed patients, 8,321 individuals tracked down, 15,120 work hours lost at 7 Arizona hospitals due to furloughs of staff who were not appropriately vaccinated, and almost $800,000 spent by 2 hospitals just to contain the disease--and it all could have been prevented.
Air travelers may have been exposed to measles WASHINGTON (AP) - Public health officials are warning travelers and workers present at four U.S. airports on two recent days that they may have been exposed to measles from a traveler arriving from London. Authorities said Saturday that a New Mexico woman later confirmed to have measles arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport late in the afternoon of Feb. 20. Two days later, the measles-infected traveler departed from BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport near Baltimore on an evening flight to Denver, Colo., and then on to Albuquerque, N.M.…
Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
If there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement I've learned over the last five or so years, it's that it's virtually completely immune to evidence, science, and reason. No matter how much evidence is arrayed against it, it always finds a way to spin, distort, or misrepresent it to combat the evidence. Not that this is any news to readers of this blog or other skeptical blogs that make combatting anti-vaccine propaganda one of its major themes, but it bears repeating often. It also bears repeating and emphasizing examples of just the sort of disingenuous and even outright deceptive…
If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre. Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998. Interview in The Independent. The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear. As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
I've written previously about "chicken pox parties". These types of events are coming back into vogue (they were common in the days before the vaccine, when the only way to provide immunity was to be infected), as parents mistakenly believe that "natural exposures" to these pathogens are somehow superior--and safer--than vaccinations. Though the latest rage are "H1N1 parties", chicken pox parties are still around, and potentially being held at your local McDonald's by families connecting on the internet: I am trying to put together a chicken pox party and am looking for someone to donate…
The Autism Omnibus Trial is a conundrum for the infectious disease promotion movement. Still, their ability to pick up the goalposts and run is unmatched, and that is just what David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have done in today's Huffington Post. To review, the recent Omnibus decision looked at a few test cases for the "vaccine causes autism" hypothesis, and tossed them for being inconsistent with reality. This correlates well with what science has to say about the issue. But of course the overwhelming evidence isn't going to deter these superheroes. They know the answer, and they're…
Pity Andrew Wakefield. Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…
The movement against vaccination is old---very old. All medical interventions require scrutiny. Like any medical intervention, vaccines require systematic investigation before deployment, and monitoring during their use. Still, vaccines have done more for public health than most Westerners under the age of fifty can imagine. Inoculation and vaccination have been vilified in many ways, from interfering with the will of God, to being a vast conspiracy to infect [insert ethnic group here] with [insert disease here], to a cause of autism. There have been "bad" vaccines, and when this has…