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Measles exposure warning issued for four New York counties
A traveler from Europe may have exposed people to measles in Chemung, Genesee, Livingston and Niagara counties, the New York state Department of Health warned Saturday. The traveler, who has a confirmed case of measles, visited multiple sites in upstate New York on April 30, and May 1-2. Anyone who visited the following locations on these dates and times could have been exposed:
- Old Country Buffet, 821 Country Route 64, Elmira, between 1 and 4 p.m. April 30.
- Ontario Travel Plaza on the New York state Thruway in Le Roy, between 4 and 6:30 p.m. April 30.
- Sheraton Niagara Falls, 300 3rd Street, Niagara Falls, from 5:30 p.m. April 30 to 9:30 a.m. on May 2.
- Niagara Falls Urgent Care, 3117 Military Road. Suite 2, Niagara Falls, between 3 and 6 p.m. May 1.
- Exit 5 on Interstate 390 in Dansville, from 9:30 a.m. to noon May 2.
The times reflect the period that the infected person was in these areas and a two-hour period after the individual left the area. The virus remains alive in the air and on surfaces for up to two hours.
takyon: Measles outbreaks have been reported in Okinawa, Pennsylvania, and Missouri recently.
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Measles Exposure Warning Issued for Four New York Counties
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday May 07 2018, @07:16PM (47 children)
Measles vaccinations have been common for decades
(Score: 2, Insightful) by chucky on Monday May 07 2018, @07:49PM (18 children)
Yes, they have. But lately there's a growing number of people who refuse to give the vaccinations to their kids, so the overall vaccination ratio dropped under 95% of the population, which is needed to prevent the epidemic.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @08:16PM (15 children)
And if there is an epidemic, every death should get anti-vaxxers charged with murder.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @08:45PM (2 children)
Charge the people who shake hands. Charge the people who work in restaurants without face masks. Charge the people who recontaminate their hands when turning off sinks.
We don't even have vaccines for most things. Enterovirus-68 can paralyze you, and there is no vaccine. Fix your filthy behavior... and if you don't, you should be charged with murder.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 07 2018, @09:12PM
She refused to stop working in the food industry
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday May 07 2018, @11:50PM
Shaking hands is one of the curses of American society. Although President Macron is really, really good at it. OK, now tell me, tell me, you ever watch, I watch in amazement. They're standing there grabbing the urinal for balance. And then they come up and they say, "Mr. Trump, I'm a big fan, I'd like to shake your hand." I may be a bad guy, when you say excuse me, you were just holding the urinal. They go up and they, they want to shake your hand. They're not doing it to be bad people.
Let me tell you, I'm a clean hands freak. I wash my hands as much as possible. I like cleanliness. Cleanliness is a nice thing. Not only hands, body, everything.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:05PM (1 child)
And every adverse reaction death should also charge the vaccine administrators with murder.
Murder charges for everyone!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 07 2018, @09:30PM
Sounds good to me. I need the dividends from the Private Prison stock, so I can avoid becoming their customer.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @10:19PM (8 children)
No, the measels vaccination scheme was originally predicted to eradicate it in a few years. They should have stopped it once they realized
1) how much more virulant the measles virus is than eg small pox,
2) waning measles immunity after vaccination was much stronger than after infection,
3) Much weaker maternal immunity for the first months of life when birthed by vaccinated mothers,
4) the plateau of vaccine effectiveness was too low
Now we are in a "honeymoon period" and a giant epidemic of vaccinated people is nearly guaranteed at some point. That is real reason the cdc freak out so much about any sign of such a minor illness and they try to shift the blame to some negligible (compared to those lacking immunity for other reasons) number of anti-vaxxers. You are falling for propaganda.
https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/when-treatments-go-awry-unexpected-consequences-of-disease-control-measures [siam.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @10:31PM (7 children)
Your source for waning measles immunity please?
(Aside from the known pre-1967 dead vaccine which was not ineffective so they switched to attenuated...)
One shot for low risk, two for high risk, lifetime. Here's mine. [cdc.gov] I wouldn't call 97% effectiveness low, you can worse secondary immunity scientifically of course? And AFAIK measles has never had quite the global eradication effort that smallpox and polio has, you're welcome to introduce sources to try and prove that....
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 07 2018, @10:50PM (2 children)
Waning effectiveness I have always read not as "didn't provide an effective immunization" but rather "the conferred immunity wore off relatively quickly".
FWIW, dead virus vaccines often have a relatively rapid waning of effectiveness. I believe the original Salk polio vaccine needed to be repeated every seven years. But they're relatively safe (as vaccines). The live (weakened) virus vaccines tend to confer relatively long immunizations (I think the Sabin polio vaccine was considered permanent), but they're relatively likely to induce an infectious case of the disease. IIRC for the current measles vaccine you are supposed to avoid the very elderly, infants, and pregnant women for a week or so.
I've always felt that it should be a two stage vaccination process, first with a killed virus vaccine and a month or so later with a live virus vaccine.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @11:29PM
It's the way I read it also, but the measles component of MMR vaccine is attenuated (live) since 1967. You get revaccinated with MMR because of the mumps and rubella components which do have half-lives, but once vaccinated for measles always vaccinated. So claiming there would be a waning effectiveness from measles vaccine is incorrect.
The key word is 'relative...' The oral attenuated polio vaccine is problematic in that 3 per 1,000,000 doses will revert and cause paralytic polio (VAPP), however, those numbers are nothing compared to the number of persons who would be infected without it (IIRC 1 in 200 and the polio eradication program noted that for the 580 cases of VAPP found there would have been 6,000,000 polio cases (30,000 paralytics), so the numbers are still safer. The injected inactivated vaccine doesn't suffer that but does have a half-life, but is about three times as costly.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:45AM
The recommended protocol for polio depends on where you are. If you are in the U.S., or another low-risk area, they recommend 4 IPV vaccinations. If you are in a high-risk area, they recommend both the OPV for initial vaccination, as there are more side effects and the risk of actually causing a polio outbreak in the area, but it is faster acting. After the initial OPV, they recommend IPV for long-term immunity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @11:34PM (3 children)
Regarding waning immunity in the vaccinated person:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29317117 [nih.gov]
Regarding waning immunity in the infants of vaccinated mothers:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29398276 [nih.gov]
Although the cdc does host data elsewhere, their prose webpage is an awful source for anything besides "what does the cdc say about this?". They don't say where their data came from (how long was followup, etc) or anything.
"Low" vs "high" depends on how easy it is for one person to infect another so it depends on the virus. The usual estimate is that ~93% of the population [nih.gov] needs to be immune in the case of measles. About 94% of the US population [nih.gov] is thought to be vaccinated for measles (MMR).
That gives .97*.94 ~ 91% immunity, which won't work. And the primary reason for un/under-vaccination is not "anti-vaxxers", it seems to be simply poverty. Even if you got rid of all anti-vaxxers, 97% effectiveness still wouldn't be good enough:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2386034 [ssrn.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11331131 [nih.gov]
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/114/1/187 [aappublications.org]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876341312000496 [sciencedirect.com]
Not sure what relevance this has but that makes this honeymoon phase even more tenuous.
Also, I don't know the source of the 97% value but I do know there was never a real blinded RCT for any measles vaccine so it will be too high (the doctors know vaccination status and so diagnose something else). Also, all those sources are just for example so let me know if there are any methodological issues you see.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:40PM (2 children)
Very interesting set of sources. It will take me time to digest them, thank you. The first source seems to confirm that there is 96% effectiveness for the measles vaccine throughout the follow up period. But I see where titer results wane over time, the question would be at what point is the titration rate ineffective (and that is a variable range, not a set number...) And I follow the concern with passive immunity, however that was one study which suggested that in a very limited field of literature review. The usual "more study is needed" is emphasized with a review as limited as that. I don't believe the answer is "don't vaccinate the mother." But it is food for thought and further study.
I'll need to review the second set of references closely, as it is an interesting construction; if the math and logic holds then the number would be around 96% required to be vaccinated to cross the 93% effected population. California had around 2.5% personal belief exemptions the last year they were allowed source, admittedly could be better if I had time. [latimes.com]. I realize the country-wide numbers could be significantly different, but that would be pretty darn close to crossing from 94% to 96% vaccinated population for proper herd immunity.
Some of those secondary sources seem to be talking world population, and others U.S. I'd say it's poverty's handmaiden, lack of education, as much as poverty itself. But I could be wrong.
The relevance of discussing global eradication was
I'm not saying you wouldn't find a source to substantiate what you said, but a focused global effort did not happen whose concentration was eradication. The way smallpox was eradicated and the way polio is heading. However, I take the point that measles is highly contagious and therefore makes containment an even higher challenge.
But I'll have to see if I have time to delve deeper because it's an interesting take you have.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:28PM
I was wrong, they predicted eradication in one year:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:50PM
From their Fig 1A it looked like the "seropositivity threshold" they use would be crossed 5-10 years later, which would be ~20 years after being vaccinated at 4-6 years old, or 25-30 years old.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29317117 [nih.gov]
I would agree that understanding is limited (as is all medical understanding at this point), but this has been something known since the beginning. They have been changing the vaccination age based on this since the 1960s:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3549395 [nih.gov]
It doesn't really since the math (SIR models) typically assume a "well-mixed population", ie every person is equi-likely to come in contact with every other person. However, that is whats used to determine policy... The models do seem capable of capturing elements of in the patterns of infectious disease incidence such as its cyclic nature though. Also you could probably find big issues with the vaccination rate data since it is based on a survey, but once again that is what they use.
Polio eradication seems to have its own issues. Diseases with the exact same symptoms are on the rise as polio diagnoses drop:
Trends in Nonpolio Acute Flaccid Paralysis Incidence in India 2000 to 2013. Neetu Vashisht, Jacob Puliyel, Vishnubhatla Sreenivas. Pediatrics Feb 2015, 135 (Supplement 1) S16-S17; DOI: 10.1542/peds.2014-3330DD. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/135/Supplement_1/S16.2 [aappublications.org]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Bot on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:13AM
what deaths? if you only vaxed adults you would have more deaths by asteroid striking. BTW the stats about measles deaths back in the day when vaccination did not occur are likely fudged. I am old enough to remember too few deaths in my circle of childhood acquaintances (none).
I have been vaccinated, I once had reactions two days later, never been so weak in my whole life. But I still am not against them. Just don't have private profits over them, it's madness. What you should punish too, though, is harmful preservatives, harmful choice of combo vaccination, harmful choice of age, and consider nature is not standing still when humans strike so you become if not legally, morally responsible of pathogens mutations.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @08:40PM (1 child)
That number is determined by how unsanitary people are. We could go with 0% and still eliminate all human disease if people would stop being unsanitary.
Some places have their act together more than other places. In the USA, we are expected to shake hands. In Japan, it is common for people to weak masks in public; the sick people particularly feel a duty to protect others from their disease.
It's all about culture. Start with yourself, then teach your children.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @03:10AM
Apparently didn't work in okinawa, japan.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @08:25PM (27 children)
A measles vaccine only grants immunity for a few years. If you actually had measles, you would have gained lifetime immunity and would not have had to freak out over "european travellers". Having measles as a child is a nuisance. Having measles as an adult can be a very big problem. This is one big reason people think that measles vaccination is not a good idea.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday May 07 2018, @08:49PM (20 children)
Having measles is only a nuisance if you survive.
The children that died aren't around to complain about it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:12PM (2 children)
It was a nuisance, and what was even more of a nuisance is having to get vaccination for College because "I had the real thing" is not a valid excuse for the stupid vaccination requirement.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @10:23PM
It doesn't hurt to be vaccinated anyway, however, you could have gone and gotten an MMR Titer lab test, which would have proven your immunity. Your college should (should!) accept a positive titer result as proof you didn't need the immunization.
Taking the shot probably would have been quicker.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:38PM
Just get the fucking vaccination, you pussy. You aren't going to get autism, you moron.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 07 2018, @09:14PM (16 children)
Pretty sure I had the measles and the mumps, as did most of my classmates. Nobody in my schools ever died of these things, and if kids in the county ever died of childhood disease, it wasn't the kind of thing that made the news. I was, perhaps, at the golden age of non-vaccination, where we had the best handle on caring for the diseases but not yet a way to prevent many of them. Things like tetanus and polio did have vaccines already, and we did know friends of friends who had died from both before the vaccines became common.
Sure, you _can_ die of measles, just as you can die of car crash, or even shark bite. I'll take my chances with the sharks (and have, on many occasions). The car bothers me, but I haven't found a way to put food on the table without taking that risk fairly often. Measles? Meh, my jury is still out whether it is better to have it in childhood as good protection against a serious adult case, or take the shot, avoid the 2 weeks home from school, and then take your chances for 50+ years that a random case might float your way and smite you down.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @10:18PM (12 children)
First, the last Measles death in the U.S. was in 2015. Pneumonia comorbid from measles. Annually it killed 73,000 worldwide in 2014, down from 2.6 million deaths in 1980, thanks to vaccination.
Mainly the deaths are people with problems like compromised immune systems, infants, or the elderly; death generally happens because the body is weakened enough to allow a comorbid condition. So refusing to be vaccinated... you'll likely live. What about the person you infect? That's quite aside from the medical costs of the vaccine versus the cost of all the medical treatment to the infected to make sure people don't complicate or die. Plus, it wouldn't be that hard to get back up into the millions of cases per year again, I don't think.
Sharks, cars... you can't be vaccinated from.
Being vaccinated if you've had the disease does no harm. If you haven't had the disease ("pretty sure?") and you acquire it.... well, good luck! I've never known anyone who has had measles or mumps who doesn't well remember the experience, though I admit it has been quite a few years since I met anyone who had it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @10:22PM (4 children)
Before the blood tests a lot of other viruses got diagnosed as measels since they cause the same symptoms. Also people used to literally spread measles on purpose and dont do that anymore. Dont you think the influence of those factors should be accounted for?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @10:45PM (3 children)
It is not impossible that a different maculopapular rash disease can be mistaken for measles, although it isn't easy because measles has a pretty distinct rash presentation. How much error would you like in the numbers because it is still overwhelming even at 50% misdiagnosis. But I'm talking about the difference between 1980 and 2014, well into the realm of when MMR titers have been available and could be used if there was a question, and generally would be on autopsy if there was a question. So no, I don't think the influence of those factors means much.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @11:41PM
It seems to be somewhere between 90 and 99.5%, but no one seems to study this directly using doctors blinded to vaccination status:
“A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
“This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ [nih.gov]
“As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
"Indeed, an average of only 100 cases of measles are confirmed annually [32], despite the fact that >20,000 tests are conducted [28], directly suggesting the low predictive value of clinical suspicion alone. "
Walter A. Orenstein, Rafael Harpaz; Completeness of Measles Case Reporting: Review of Estimates for the United States, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 189, Issue Supplement_1, 1 May 2004, Pages S185–S190, https://doi.org/10.1086/378501 [doi.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @12:30AM
Another thing is we see these same "measles outbreak" stories every year at the same time, measles seems to be cycling in the US the same as it ever did. Last I really looked into it was a few years ago now but it shouldn't matter much:
https://image.ibb.co/iM5f4S/Measles_Cases_By_Week.png [image.ibb.co]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @02:56AM
Ok, we'll check back next year weeks 10-20.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:43AM
as a comment: I had several common childhood diseases as an infant (including measles and mumps, my mother confirmed), and I don't remember having them. So people not remembering whether or not they had some childhood disease is not at all strange to me.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 08 2018, @12:05PM (5 children)
And this was my point about the "golden age" - with good control of comorbid conditions, and reasonable protection for infants and the elderly, measles isn't that big a thing. 2.6 million measles deaths in 1980, how many deaths from starvation? This is just excess deaths due to famine: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Famine-victims-since-1860s_March18.png [ourworldindata.org]
No, but you can stay out of the water, or off the road, both of which are options - maybe not 100% practical options, but options.
I had 3 or 4 "home from school" childhood disease experiences, all before the age of about 10. They sort of all run together as time spent at grandma's house alone watching Price is Right instead of going to school.
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:53PM (3 children)
Deaths and serious illness still occur even with good control of comorbid conditions, and those comorbidities can arise as complications also. Having to manage a comorbidity because people won't vaccinate is a problem. The period of communication for measles begins four days before symptoms appear, so I'm interested what reasonable protections you feel are in order for infants and elderly to protect them from exposure to an unsymptomatic but infectious person. And the point is not that others die from other conditions, which introduces a straw man. The point is that those 2.6 million deaths were mainly preventable. And sure, we can talk about how those other deaths could also have been prevented, the minute the thread someone posts about an outbreak of famine.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 08 2018, @03:51PM
The famine strawman was propped up because of the 2.6 million "measles related deaths worldwide in 1980" argument. Point being: worldwide, there are lots of problems managing lots of things. Worldwide, contact lenses aren't a good idea because of the lack of ability to manage common infections associated with contact lens use. The measles vaccine has a good history, and with thimerosal preservative in multi-dose vials is economically feasible to distribute worldwide to people who want it. Even with the known risks and >0% rate of complications, I'm "pro" measles vaccination.
Dengue, maybe not so much:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/17/health/sanofi-dengue-vaccine-philippines.html [nytimes.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:12PM
You should assume that everybody has their own unique disease. Take the precautions needed for that, and disease propagation nearly stops.
No, you won't get perfection, but that isn't required. The requirement is that the average infected person will infect less than one other person, for example 0.5 other people. At a rate of 0.5, an initial population of N infected people will infect N/2 directly, and those then infect N/4, and so on... adding up to a total of about N, and the disease dies out with only 2N having ever been infected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:09AM
Infants used to have long lasting maternal antibodies and the elderly already got measles when young and healthy so they had lifelong immunity. This is a problem created by vaccination, not prevented by it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:46PM
So because more people die of starvation than measles, we should not vaccinate against measles? Wat.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 07 2018, @10:55PM
Well, people did die of measles, though admittedly it was relatively uncommon. Permanent neural damage was more common. And mumps is a disease that one can catch several times if all the susceptible glands don't become infected the first time. If you don't get it in your genitals until you're adolescent, then it can cause permanent sterility.
So in a way you're correct. The mortality was quite low among those of European ancestry. (And probably Asian.) Others hadn't had their ancestors repeatedly killed off.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:16AM
> Pretty sure I had the measles and the mumps, as did most of my classmates. Nobody in my schools ever died of these things, and if kids in the county ever died of childhood disease, it wasn't the kind of thing that made the news.
Same here.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:43PM
So, nobody in your small sample size of a few hundred kids died of measles or mumps, and any that did were so unnoteworty as to not bother even reporting on.
So how the fuck did you know nobody died of it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @10:21PM (5 children)
Only if you were vaccinated pre-1967. [healthline.com]
You're welcome.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @11:08PM (3 children)
There have been few conclusive studies on measles vaccine longevity; CDC only reports effectiveness, which is a different kind of measure. Some years back there was a study in India, that found that only 20% of children had immunity even after two doses of the vaccine:
http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/measles-vaccine-protects-only-1-out-of-5-children-in-delhi-study/854162/ [indianexpress.com]
Administering a third dose (as part of a second dose of MMR) increased immunity to 72%. The study notes, however, that this indicates effectiveness, not longevity. Absent additional data it would be prudent to adopt the precautionary conclusion that the vaccinated immunity is not lifelong and requires periodic revaccination. The lack of measles infections in the US, where measles is considered extinct, should be tentatively attributed more to lack of infected children to spread the disease. The 98% effectiveness figure cited by the CDC just may be a consequence of that, since after leaving school, we are far less likely to encounter children with measles and so remain uninfected in spite of lack of immunity.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:19AM (2 children)
Different AC now.
Those results are from India where many of the mothers had actually measles rather than received a vaccination. This means the maternal antibodies will in general neutralize the vaccine (prevent it from doing anything) for much longer than in the US. Strangely, in the US the vaccination age is now too late at 12 months but in India they tried doing 9 months... So this looks like large scale incompetence to me.
I think the "vaccine advocates" have a lot of trouble with this one since they've been trying to use "you're threatening my babies" to drum up hatred towards "anti-vaxxers" so they can misdirect blame towards them for the eventual end of the measles "honeymoon period". They've spread a lot of misinfo about not vaccinating newborns because it is dangerous, when that is not the reason at all.
The actual threat is the regulators who refuse to push up the age of vaccination to account for quicker waning immunity in the US. They don't want to do that because they will
1) be publicizing a negative aspect of the vaccine, and
2) triggering an irrational fear in the public of a danger to the infant.
This only creates a larger susceptible population and thus hastens the onset of the honeymoon's end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:28PM (1 child)
Your explanation does not work because the Indian study measured immunity after *two* vaccinations. It is plausible that the first vaccination may have been neutralized by maternal antibodies, but the second one should have had the full effect. Look also at the result of the third dose: immunity was spread to 70%, up from 20%. The increase of 50 points appears to indicate initial vaccine effectiveness of over 50%, with immunity waning over time. This hypothesis would explain why in the US two full doses are sufficient to maintain 97% effectiveness at the time of testing (I was unable to find the numbers on the age at which the testing was done, if any test was done at all). Then, over, say, 5-10 years, immunity wanes and tends to disappear completely. So I still say that it would be best to assume that recurrent vaccination may be required.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:37PM
I think the first one given in the presence of maternal antibodies is supposed to still induce an "innate immunity" T-cell response which later "interferes" with the B-cell (antibody) response to the vaccine. I can't find a mention of it at the moment though...
And sure, there is waning anyway (see other discussion in this thread about that) but that seems much quicker than usually reported.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:19AM
Problem:
Your business is selling vaccines for an illness.
Solution A is effective few years.
Solution B is lifelong.
Question: how many hitmen you hire to make sure nobody knows of Solution B?
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