You know that measles outbreak that started at Disneyland? Pediatricians say yo, that’s a hint that people should be vaccinated.
The leading U.S. pediatrician group on Friday urged parents, schools and communities to vaccinate children against measles in the face of an outbreak that began at Disneyland in California in December and has spread to more than 50 people.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said all children should get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine between the ages of 12 and 15 months old and again between 4 and 6 years old.
No, this is not like people who make Fords saying all people should buy Fords. It’s different from that.
“A family vacation to an amusement park – or a trip to the grocery store, a football game or school – should not result in children becoming sickened by an almost 100 percent preventable disease,” Dr. Errol Alden, the group’s executive director, said in a written statement.
“We are fortunate to have an incredibly effective tool that can prevent our children from suffering. That is so rare in medicine,” Alden said.
So rare and so so valuable. Wouldn’t we love to have an incredibly effective tool that can prevent AIDS or diabetes or cancers or Crohn’s or arthritis or Alzheimer’s?
Imagine having that and refusing to avail yourself of it.
The California Department of Public Health has reported 59 confirmed measles cases among state residents since the end of December, most linked to an initial exposure at Disneyland or the adjacent Disney California Adventure Park.
Nine more cases linked to the two Walt Disney Co-owned parks, were reported out of state – one inMexico, three in Utah, two in Washington state and one each in Oregon, Colorado and Arizona.
Officials say the outbreak appeared to begin when an infected person, likely from out of the country, visited the Anaheim resort from Dec. 15 to Dec. 20.
Among those infected are at least five Disney employees and a student at Huntington Beach High School, some 15 miles (24 km) from the park. Earlier this week, the school ordered its unvaccinated students to stay home until Jan. 29.
There shouldn’t be any unvaccinated students in school apart from the small number who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons.
Life, liberty and the ability to spread disease – its in the Constitution!
Well, except cervical cancer. Not that one.
In some ways, part of the problem is that vaccines are effective. The result is we’ve got an entire generation that has absolutely no memories of things like people in iron lungs due to polio, children dying of the complications of the measles or being blinded, and so on… and those people have been making decisions for their children based in part on complete ignorance of the actual consequences.
And part on fear-mongering by people like Andrew Wakefield, who wanted to make money from being an expert witness, as well as make money from his own single-virus measles vaccine, which he wasn’t going to be able to do until he cast doubt on the effectiveness of the current vaccine in use.
And part of course on things that go well into conspiracy theory territory.
CC – oh jeez, I totally forgot about that one.
Not just MMR but TDAP too. All should be mandatory with legal sanctions against non-compliant parents unless there are documented medical reasons not to vaccinate. FFS at this rate we’ll be seeing a resurgence of smallpox. It’s only a few decades ago that we couldn’t travel to another country without a smallpox certificate.