Fear of Vaccines Spurs Outbreaks, Study Says

[question everything]

MAY 7, 2009

Fear of Vaccines Spurs Outbreaks, Study Says

By KEITH J. WINSTEIN
WSJ

Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report. A U.S. measles outbreak last year -- almost exclusively among unvaccinated people -- has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

In Ashland, Ore., more than a quarter of kindergartners aren't vaccinated, leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hold a town-hall meeting on vaccination there earlier this year. "A lot of folks are counterculture-type independent thinkers do not have faith in all the modern medicine-type stuff," said Myles Murphy, city editor of the town's newspaper, the Ashland Daily Tidings. Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

(snip)

Vaccines for diseases like whooping cough aren't 100% effective for each individual, and some children can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. That means that eradicating a disease requires vaccinating a large percentage of the nearby population to stop infections from spreading -- what's called "herd immunity." In Colorado, schools with an outbreak of whooping cough in the 1990s had an average of 4.3% of students who had opted out of vaccination, compared with 1.5% at schools without an outbreak, a study cited by Dr. Omer found.

About 20 states allow exemptions from vaccinations on account of personal beliefs, including California, Texas, Pennsylvania and much of the West. In those states, the rate of opting out had risen to 2.8% last year, up from 1% in 1991, according to state reports compiled by the CDC. "Overall coverage is quite high, but that doesn't mean it's uniformly high, and it's the clustering of exemptors that we get quite concerned about," said Lance Rodewald, director of the CDC's immunization services division.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124165229009493675.html (subscription)

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D2

[madrchsod]

1. i guess another generation should be reminded

what their grandparents and great grandparents went through when there were no vaccines.

but sometimes people are just ignore the truth to satisfy their beliefs.

[phantom power]

3. vaccination has become a victim of its huge success.

An entire generation grew up basically not fearing disease.

It would be a shame if we have to re-learn this lesson by another generation having to live in fear of their children dying from diseases that we know how to prevent.

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. I think it is not so much a lack of fear of disease, as a media induced

incapability of differentiating threats. When the media is doing its "fear, fear" thing, and goes on about a possibility of vaccines being connected to autism, what people come away with is the fear of the vaccine being EQUAL to the fear of the disease - and naturally, as people see less of the disease in the everyday world and more of the autism, they wind up giving more weight to the fear of the vaccine.

Then, as I stated below, there is the mistrust of the pharma companies that push the fabulous drug of the month, only to have it recalled six months later for killing the people that take it, which leads people to mistrust everything the pharma companies say - not to mention the FDA which approved, then withdrew, the drugs.

People simply don't know who to trust - and for very good reason. It leads to irrational, and dangerous, decision making.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Perhaps people would be a little more trusting of the vaccines

if they were not aware of how the pharmaceutical companies are NOT in the business of providing health but in the business of providing dividends to their shareholders; and if they were not aware of the FDA sitting on medications long-since approved in other countries while it rushed through poorly tested medications which subsequently killed or injured thousands at the behest of those pharmaceutical companies.

Bad behavior engenders mistrust - who'd a thunk it?

[cosmik debris]

5. .

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

[kestrel91316]

4. Fear of vaccines has caused an increase in preventable diseases

in pets also. Feline distemper was a thing of the past until a few years ago, it being totally preventable with vaccinations. Now I see it occasionally, and I guess the pounds and rescues and such have got ongoing problems with it. SHAMEFUL.

I also used to NEVER see respiratory infections bad enough to need medical care for decades, but as people have slacked off on vaccinations, now I make a good deal of money by treating unnecessary respiratory disease.

I don't know if it's fear, or just succumbing to the propaganda that vaccinations are not needed and do more harm than good (which is totally false, and that's not simply my opinion). But it's really sad that teh stoopid has gotten so entrenched in our society and has caused such suffering.

[GoneOffShore]

7. It's not just the fear of vaccines. It's the fear of any "conventional medicine".

And a devotion to "Alternatives.

I was over at Science Blogs and came across this:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/homeopathy_kills_a_child.php

Homeopathy Kills a Child

Homeopathy is water.

Homeopaths will tell you otherwise. They will tell you that water "memory," which, the way they describe it is some mystical property whereby it "remembers" the remedy with which it's been in contact, even though the substance (whatever it was) has been diluted far beyond the point where there's likely to be even one molecule of it left. Not only that, but they will, in all seriousness, tell you that dilution is not enough.
<snip>
Homeopathy is water, and, when substituted for real medicine, it can kill:

A homeopath, Thomas Sam, 42, and his wife, Manju Sam, 36, are standing trial in the NSW Supreme Court charged with manslaughter by gross criminal negligence after they allegedly resisted the advice of nurses and a doctor to send her to a skin specialist.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/dead-babys-parents-ignored-advice-qc-20090504-asmt.html
more on the story:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/too-busy-to-care-for-dying-baby-qc-20090505-au20.html

[xchrom]

8. recommend -- anti-vaxers are giving bad medical advise. nt