Mary Wisniewski at Reuters tells us there’s a measles outbreak in Chicago.
Five babies at a suburban Chicago daycare center have been diagnosed with measles, adding to a growing outbreak of the disease across the United States, Illinois health officials said on Thursday.
Officials are investigating the cluster of measles cases at KinderCare Learning Center in Palatine, said a statement from the Illinois and Cook County health departments. All the children are under 1 year old and would not have been subject to routine measles vaccination, which begins at 12 months.
Infants. With measles. Thanks, anti-vaxxers.
Public health officials have reported that more than 100 people across the United States have been infected with measles, many of them traced to an outbreak that began at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, in December.
“These cases underscore the need for everyone who is eligible for the vaccine to ensure that they have been vaccinated,” Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “There are certain individuals who, because of their age or clinical condition, cannot be vaccinated.”
A local news station here in Seattle reported last night that there’s a Waldorf school where 38 point something percent of the students are not vaccinated.
On the advice of health officials, the KinderCare center is excluding until Feb. 24 unvaccinated children and staff who may have been exposed to the virus, according to a statement from Knowledge Universe, KinderCare’s parent company. The center was given a “deep clean” on Wednesday night, the statement said.
Let’s go back to the good old days when there were no vaccines and diseases kept the population in check.
Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 after decades of intensive childhood vaccine efforts.
Oops.
From today’sDemocracy Now!.
Ophelia, did you see this database of vaccination-exemption rates in Washington schools? Seattle Waldorf School is close to 40% exempt students. Many others are rather high. But there are some schools with exemption rates under 5%. It can be done, if there is a will. Washington law is incredibly lax. As long as the kid’s doctor conforms that they talked to the parents about the benefits and risks of vaccines the kid can attend school with an exemption from vaccinations. This is ridiculous and a disaster waiting to happen.
Sorry for the typo: “As long as the kid’s doctor conforms that they talked to the parents…” should have been ‘confirms’.
Meh, Waldorf — it figures. Based on some 19th century crackpot’s theories about pedagogy etc.
The California exemption is even fluffier. No doctor confirmation or anything needed. You just tick a box on a form. However, now that the Good Old Days are being brought back with a vengeance, a couple of state legislators have introduced a bill to do away with personal belief/religion exemptions.
It’s amazing how fast people understand where personal choice fits in the scheme of things when it threatens them with disease.
@ SC, #1:
I was listening to DN in the car earlier today. I’m actually furious at Goodman for allowing Holland to spout outright lies for so long without direct challenge or interruption. She got the basic definition of herd immunity wrong. She claimed Hep B was only sexually transmitted. She repeated misinformation about environmental mercury being identical to the mercury in thimerasol. She claimed no studies have been done to follow health outcomes based on vaccination rates. She claimed Germany has had no outbreaks on a voluntary program. And on and on and on. It was a fucking Gish Gallop!
I’m glad they followed it up with some no-nonsense “yeah, that’s idiocy” content, but that woman should never have been given that platform to spew so much misinformation. And spewing is what she was clearly trying to do — she talked incredibly fast and tried to talk over anybody interrupting her. Infuriating!
So yeah, this was great, from her next guest:
But I absolutely believe it was incredibly irresponsible journalism by Amy Goodman and the Democracy Now crew.
To clarify, what I find irresponsible was that DN had originally planned a “debate”, in which the actual practicing medical expert flat-out refused to participate in, and gave his reasons, namely, that her position was demonstrably factually wrong, and he saw no reason to legitimize her views with a debate.
But for whatever reason, after being told this, they felt the need for balance — “we wanted to hear from the parents” — and gave this woman a 10 minute interval in which to vomit ignorance and misinformation.
Complete journalistic failure.
Hm. I have mixed feelings. I had the same initial reaction. But in her defense:
First, she likes to hold debates even when one side is clearly wrong and even when one side is clearly telling falsehoods. I still remember back in 2009 when she hosted a debate about the Honduras coup between Greg Grandin and paid shill Lanny Davis. I remember being annoyed at the time that she was giving Davis a platform, and similarly irritated during other debates. On the other hand, I can sort of see the point: the people have to go on record making their claims and can’t claim they were silenced or strawmanned, and they’re put on in a context in which the claims can (for the most part) be rebutted, at the time or later. I’m not really sure where I come down on it, in the end.
Second, in this case, I had the sense that she honestly wanted to understand where the antivaxxers were coming from. She has so many stories about the duplicity and general evilness of corporations, including pharma, and how they put forward pseudoscience as science. There’s clearly reason to be suspicious in general. I think if you haven’t been following the issue it can be hard to understand that the antivax people don’t represent a reasonable skepticism – that instead of the massive number of useless, harmful, garbage drugs being inflicted on children for corporate profit, they’ve bizarrely and assholishly chosen to oppose an intervention (the MMR vaccine) with decades of evidence in support of its safety and efficacy. In other words, if you haven’t seen them in action, it’s hard to appreciate just how stupid this movement is. (I recall once at Orac’s reading Jay Gordon, Jenny McCarthy’s pediatrician, say he was suspicious of the evidence base for vaccines, and asking him whether he’s equally suspicious of all drugs, and if so how he makes decisions about prescribing anything. I don’t think he had a response.)
Slightly tangential: There was a woman on the CBC Radio program The Current This AM talking about how she got sucked into anti-vaxxism. But after a while she noticed how moms in the movement seemed to believe every other conspiracy theory and medical woo out there, became disenchanted, and started doing some real research….and got her kids vaccinated. Whereupon she instantly became a pariah.
It’s interesting how the vaccine debate has gone mainstream in the past few weeks. And gratifying to see that media coverage is mostly on the right side. (At least in my sphere).
@ SC:
You make some good points, in particular this bit of summation:
Sometimes I tend to forget that people actually don’t know that much about vaccines, medical trials, etc. I mean, everyone I know is talking about it constantly, so therefore everyone knows about it!
I do wish there had been more pushback during the actual interview, instead of what at best was a cataloguing of factual error and outright lies. In the same way that people don’t know that much, a lot of people can listen to that interview and either be confused or find validation for wrong-headed beliefs.
I also wish the disclaimer that this was originally going to be a debate — but wasn’t, because one of the sides was demonstrably wrong — came first, even if it was a generic “my following guest claims she gets the science wrong, we’ll ask her about that”. moment.
Eamon Knight, while the Waldorf school is an extreme case, as is the Home School Resource Center (2nd place in Seattle with some 34% exempt students), many mainstream schools are in the 8%-12% range. The schools in the 15%-25% range tend to be all sorts of progressive/alternative public and private schools. This is worrying.
How times have changed. I was born not too many years after the polio vaccine. Most of my vaccinations were given in school by the school nurse (yes, in a town of 4000 population, we had a full-time school nurse, albeit she covered the elementary, middle and high schools). The teacher would simply announce that tomorrow we would get a shot, so everybody be sure to wear a shirt with short or loose sleeves. AFAIK, nobody was exempted. We kids didn’t like the shots, of course, but everybody accepted that it was good for you and if you had tried to ask your parents to get you off the hook you would have been labeled a crybaby by the kids, and your parents would probably have told you the government set up this program and they had your best interests at heart. And this was in Arizona.