Measles outbreak NYC

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 2:07 pm

People who don't get boosters by not knowing they should are certainly much less to blame than those who actively refuse vaccination of small children. That is true even if they are much more numerous. At least they weren't offered it, actually are sometimes DENIED it because it can be scarce, and didn't know.

I guess you advocate vaccinating, as you are even advocating vaccinating adults whose earlier vaccines have worn off in adulthood.

I support that, if the vaccines are available in sufficient quantity. They obviously give priority to those most in need. First timers, such as children, and women of childbearing years who may not show immunity, and those going overseas.

Old people might hesitate to get re-vaccinated, but perhaps they should risk it if they are going to travel overseas.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 2:13 pm

Hashem_Yaazor wrote:

The AAP schedule does not give leeway for individual circumstances. This is my most major beef with it. It's a "one size fits all" and if you don't follow it? You're a quack. vaccines should be determined per child and per family. Not per one nation as a whole, indivisible, with justice for none Tongue Out

Some of us have babies/pregnant women in the house very often, FWIW.

Then your doctor doesn't believe in shedding, or has weighed the risks and thinks you are wrong, may know more than you, or may not be a good doctor. There are a lot of possibilities. He/she has a degree you don't and has taken statistics courses you haven't.

A good doctor explains his/her decisions. These days they may not have time or energy.

They are very busy entering your records into the computer and they have big insurance bills and they are part of a practice and are on salary, and they don't think giving a science course when nobody's sick is their job, and they get tired too, like anybody else.

Talking to the patient when illness is present they know is part of the job.

Getting the vaccinations into the kid is not an illness situation and they may not feel the need to talk as much. They may have had somebody in anguish that morning whose kid is really sick and they are talked out from that. The vaccinating is pretty simple after that kind of morning.

Scrabble123

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 2:57 pm

Dolly Welsh wrote:

Some doctors do recommend that when traveling overseas or during an outbreak to have titers to certain viruses checked and then to be revaccinated if necessary. I think that this school of thought is going to become more popular in the next few years.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:12 pm

saw50st8 wrote:

morah wants people to vaccinate because its best for other people

Today you may be the giver.

But someday you may be the taker.

You may be pg someday, or old someday, or post-cancer someday, or you may have a young child whose body CAN'T develop immunity. There are people like that on this very thread, a tiny sample, and already we have at least one, maybe two.

People like that need the herd, such as it still is, to be as vaccinated as possible. Your next kid could be like that.

So, listen to Maya, and above all listen to Scrabble123, who clearly is in the business, and knows her stuff. She is quite dubious about the shedding issue. I am relieved to know you have a good doctor after all, and the AAPQZ or whoever are right. Scrabble points out that a little shedding can be a GOOD thing.

Anybody who wants to visit a really old cemetery will see a lot of tiny little graves. You don't see that nowadays, just big fine headstones with the guy's whole resume on it, president, ceo, blah blah. None of those little bitty stones with nothing to show but a name, and two dates not very far apart.

Some things really are better now.

Hashem_Yaazor

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:15 pm

Dolly Welsh wrote:

Can I kindly ask what are you talking about? I have not brought my personal pediatrician and vaccination schedules into this discussion. I am solely talking about the AAP schedule, which is the schedule that the American Academy of Pediatrics has decided is the standard every baby should do, and states have signed into law that kids need this to go to school. Exemptions are very, very difficult. That is my problem, on a global level. Nothing to do with my personal way of vaccinating -- or not -- kids.

Regarding vaccinating adults, I'm playing devil's advocate, as I tend to do in these discussions. I encourage people to become educated and learn things for themselves instead of reading media articles. I want the truth and the evidence to be apparent. And I want people to have the ability -- and the right -- to then make an informed decision.

But my point about "herd immunity" in this topic was that in September of 2013, CDC announced that the childhood vaccination rate was near or above their target. The small portion of people who do not vaccinate cannot be blamed. It would do little good to increase the rate of childhood vaccination rates. We have surpassed the 80% rate that the Journal of the AMA stated is necessary for vaccination of the 2 yo group and higher to prevent sustained measles outbreak in urban communities.

Not vaccinating a little one (and why, then, are people ok with delaying for personal considerations, like having a baby in the house, if it's really a global health threat?) is less of an issue than all the other things going on in the world.

As I said, there are many other factors contributing to outbreaks. We saw a different mumps strain in an outbreak a couple years ago. We see waning immunity because vaccines are very different than natural immunity. We have the issue of diseases being cyclical in nature. There is a lot more going on than blaming a couple people and here and there for some outbreaks.

Hashem_Yaazor

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:18 pm

FWIW, I hate to bring this in because we all know Wakefield/fraud/MMR/autism blah blah blah...but I'm not convinced our generation is healthier these days. We may have different battles we are fighting but we have huge increases in cancers, autism, allergies, auto-immune disorders. Vaccination or not vaccination caused? Up for debate. But we don't live in an idyllic world where children no longer die. Most of our children B"H remain healthy, but a lot has to do with better sanitation and hygiene and access to medical care when necessary. There were not droves of kids dying of the measles pre-vaccine. Some deaths? Yes. Just like we have deaths from other (non-vaccine-preventable diseases) these days.

SplitPea

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:28 pm

Hashem_Yaazor wrote:

That coupled with the fact that countries like sweeden that give MUCH MUCH less vaccines than America have a MUCH lower infant mortality rate.

It's interesting that of the developed world the US and Canada have the highest vaccine rate to children but also one of the highest infant mortality rates...

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:37 pm

In the nineteenth century, meaning in normal times, there were certainly one third or one half deaths of small children. That was Just How It Was, for all of human history, before recent times. Also dying in childbirth. The Way of the World.

Recent autism increases may be from: simply better recording of it, better childhood healthcare so children who might have died in an earlier day lived to be counted, CONSANGUINITY, and, too-good hygiene.

Yes, hygiene can be too good, depending. You need some dirt. We live very clean now, and while that is good overall, that, like everything else, may come with a price. Did you ever know a good thing that did not come with a price?

And, there are all the changes of modern life, from plastics, to The Pill in the water supply, to the mercury in discarded fluorescent lightbulbs.

And the elimination of child labor. In an earlier time, an autistic child would have been considered A Little Simple, and would have been made to work anyway, at simpler tasks, and nobody would have talked about it much, or cared. They would all have been too hungry, exhausted or haggard to care. And if he had given trouble behaviorally, they would have woodshedded him, and taken off their belts. A different world. I am not mourning it.

It has now been FIVE OR SIX GENERATIONS since anybody knew what a Western world was, with absolutely no vaccines, and it is hard to viscerally understand. No one alive today has ever had a conversation with a person who lived in a completely vaccine-free world. It is just too long ago.

There is a double duty to vaccinate on schedule: duty to the kid, and duty to what's left of the herd.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:44 pm

SplitPea wrote:

It is not "interesting".

The two things have nothing to do with each other.

Correlation is not causality.

Don't you know that speaking English causes high infant mortality rates?

That's why the US and Canada have ..... wait a minute, they don't.

They just have higher rates than they should have for clean, Western countries. And some of that is statistical lumping of many different sociological levels. The lower ones bring down the average.

Swedish genes may confer natural immunity for all I know. Until recently, they were pretty uniform ethnically, and may still be, outside their cities. What do I know. I have never been there. But neither has anybody else here.

Hey, it isn't me whose against marrying a convert.

Scrabble123

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:50 pm

SplitPea wrote:

Um. I am not a person who just states my personal hypotheses and conclusions as facts, and I have no idea throwing out an idea that is not proven as a "maybe" or a "who knows," so let's think about this.

CO2 omissions?
Second hand smoke?
Bleach? Other chemicals?
Hormones?
Emotional Abuse?
Diet? Full of dairy & poultry.
Processed foods?
People live much longer than before so certain diseases occur more frequently?

If you want to live in a truly pure world you must understand that it's no longer an option. I am sure that you are aware that Cancer rates in the Amish are much lower, but not non-existent. There are areas where Cancer is currently non existent (indigenous populations): They eat absolutely no meat or dairy.. Interesting?

Now, I wouldn't advised stopping to eat these products because we don't have all of the same circumstances they do, which is also why I do not advise against vaccinations. Today these vaccines help keep kids & adults safe! There are facts: facts are that 500,000 contracted the measles yearly before the vaccine, 1% died, 2& had other complications and thousands others hospitalized. 11 babies died in California just a few years ago due to a pertussis outbreak... Smoking has been linked to lung cancer. Alcohol abuse can cause pancreatic deterioration, etc. When we will in such an "impure" society, I feel that we have to look at how we can protect ourselves with the tools that work in society and not run away into an imaginary land where there is no pollution.

Honestly, a statement assuming Sweden is safer for infants because there are less vaccinations is similar to "If I'm mean to my mother, my kids may be mean to me." With such a statement you have a false sense of security that you're children will be good to you because you are good to your mother. Things don't work like this.

Maybe Sweden is safer for infants? It imay be a fact that they have less infant deaths (I have not investigated this yet). Maybe it's because of vaccinations? Maybe it's because of a lesser use of bleach as a cleaning agent? Maybe they have less gang activity and less mothers and fathers dumping their kids into dumpsters? Neither of us knows the answer to that question, and assuming to is quite close minded. Does Sweeten ONLY have less vaccinations? How can you be so sure of what you are saying?

We try the best we can to stay healthy, and for me that includes vaccinations, and a wide variety of other things. For you it may mean something different (I'm okay with that: you have you're own right to decide even though in my ideal world everyone would be fully vaccinated), but let's not throw opinions or untested hypotheses around like facts.

Last edited by Scrabble123 on Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:59 pm; edited 3 times in total

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:56 pm

You do not control for micro-groups within the US and Canada.

The mortality is not spread evenly across the entire (vast) population of these countries.

The US has three hundred fifty million people, and they don't all live or medicate the same as each other, by a very, very long shot.

You don't know if it is the same people vaccinating as the people dying.

It is probable that the better-off vaccinate and don't die, and the lower-downs don't vaccinate as much, and do die, within the same country. So these across-the-board figures don't mean what you think they mean.

There is a lot of money wasted on education these days. Everybody has heard of the education bubble and worthless degrees.

However.

There is still something to be said for going to school, and a doctor or a statistician does indeed know more than you do.

I repeat, it is just as meaningful to say that speaking English causes this-and-that ill of the US and Canadian societies.

Those countries are the places that the world's peoples with problems head for. So, they contain people with problems.

That's no knock. It makes perfect sense to go there.

I don't have a degree in statistics, and neither do you, so we can part friends.

Last edited by Dolly Welsh on Mon, Mar 17 2014, 4:01 pm; edited 1 time in total

Scrabble123

Mon, Mar 17 2014, 3:58 pm

Dolly Welsh wrote:

But you do not control for micro-groups within the US and Canada.

The mortality is not spread evenly across the entire (vast) population of these countries.

The US has three hundred fifty million people, and they don't all live or medicate the same as each other, by a very, very long shot.

You don't know if it is the same people vaccinating as the people dying.

It is probable that the better-off vaccinate and don't die, and the lower-downs don't vaccinate as much, and do die, within the same country. So these across-the-board figures don't mean what you think they mean.

There is a lot of money wasted on education these days. Everybody has heard of the education bubble and worthless degrees.

However.

There is still something to be said for going to school and a doctor or a statistician does indeed know more than you do, from looking at two charts.

I repeat, it is just as meaningful to say that speaking English causes this and that ill of the US and Canadian societies.

Those are the places that the world's peoples with problems head for. So, they contain people with problems.

That's no knock. It makes perfect sense to go there.

I don't have a degree in statistics and neither do you so we can part friends.

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