The financial implications of the US measles outbreaks

[Guest guest]

The financial implications of the US measles outbreaks

By Seth Mnookin

....If you're skeptical about the correlation between measles vaccination rates

and the spread of the disease, or about the danger deliberately unvaccinated

members of the population pose to infants, you should check out the CDC's

figures. They're pretty stunning:

* There have been 118 reported measles cases in the first nineteen weeks of the

year — which is the highest number of infections for that period since 1996.

That's particularly noteworthy because, as the CDC points out, " as a result of

high vaccination coverage, measles elimination (i.e., the absence of endemic

transmission) was achieved in the United States in the late 1990s and likely in

the rest of the Americas since the early 2000s. "

* Eighty-nine percent of all reported cases have been in people who've been

unvaccinated. Almost 20 percent of that figure is made up of children who were

less than a year old. That means they were too young to have received the first

dose of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is given once between the

ages of twelve and fifteen months and again when a child is between four and six

years old. Another twenty percent of the total number of reported infections

were in children between the ages of one and four.

* Forty percent of the infections recorded so far this year have resulted in

hospitalization — and 98 percent of the people who were hospitalized were

unvaccinated. In its typically understated manner, the CDC noted that " nine [of

the hospitalized patients] had pneumonia, but none had encephalitis and none

died " – which is another way of saying that encephalitis and death are potential

complications of serious cases of pneumonia.

The most significant factor in the spread of measles in the United States is the

increase of pockets of the country where vaccination rates have declined below

the level needed to maintain herd immunity`– and, similar to what occurred in

the UK in the early part of the last decade, that decline can be traced back to

the press-fueled panic sparked by anti-vaccine messiah Wakefield's

discredited, retracted, and possibly fraudulent twelve-child case study linking

the MMR vaccine to autism.

Indeed, it's striking just how many of the infections are clustered around

Minnesota, where anti-vaccine activists have been for years targeting an

immigrant Somali community…..

http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2011/05/25/the-financial-implications-of-the\

-us-measles-outbreaks/