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A small but increasing number of children in the United States are not getting some or all of their recommended vaccinations. The percentage of children under 2 years old who haven't received any vaccinations has quadrupled in the last 17 years, according to federal health data released Thursday.
Overall, immunization rates remain high and haven't changed much at the national level. But a pair of reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about immunizations for preschoolers and kindergartners highlights a growing concern among health officials and clinicians about children who aren't getting the necessary protection against vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, whooping cough and other pediatric infectious diseases.
The vast majority of parents across the country vaccinate their children and follow recommended schedules for this basic preventive practice. But the recent upswing in vaccine skepticism and outright refusal to vaccinate has spawned communities of undervaccinated children who are more susceptible to disease and pose health risks to the broader public.
[...] The data underlying the latest reports do not explain the reason for the increase in unvaccinated children. In some cases, parents hesitate or refuse to immunize, officials and experts said. Insurance coverage and an urban-rural disparity are likely other reasons for the troubling rise.
Among children aged 19 months to 35 months in rural areas, about 2 percent received no vaccinations in 2017. That is double the number of unvaccinated children living in urban areas.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:06PM (5 children)
I doubt that you've observed the MMR vaccine do anything. Just because something happened after something else, doesn't mean that the first thing caused the second. This is called the post hoc fallacy.
The people that believe a MMR vaccine autism link were duped by a fraudulent study.
People who believe that preservatives in vaccines cause autism are ignorant of the data that directly contradicts it.
People who believe that "too many, too soon" and believe that combination vaccines are harmful are ignorant of the mechanisms of immunological memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#1998_The_Lancet_paper [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy#Scientific_evaluation [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyclonal_B_cell_response [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
Exactly. At the same time the measles vaccine was introduced there was also:
1) A reduction in people purposefully spreading the disease (ie, measles parties)[1]
2) The introduction of (unreliable)[2] blood tests to "confirm" the diagnoses based on symptoms alone[3, 4, 5, 6]
3) The biasing of doctors to not diagnose measles if told the patient is vaccinated.[5]
So how much did each factor contribute to the drop in measles diagnoses?
Refs:
[1] http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.full [oxfordjournals.org]
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 [nih.gov]
[3] 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]
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ [nih.gov]
[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
Are you trying to argue that the measles vaccine doesn't work?
1. Your link is broken, but I doubt that a reduction in "measles parties" for children would dramatically reduce the infection rate for the entire population especially considering that it is an airborne disease.
Ref. 2: An ELISA doesn't measure the same thing as a NT. An ELISA measures antibody binding to target antigens while an NT measures the neutralizing capacity of antibodies. Not all antibodies neutralize and not all neutralizing antibodies are equal.
Ref. 3,4,6: I don't really get your point. Do you mean that a symptoms-based diagnostic is better than a blood test because the blood test is producing thousands of supposed false negatives or that a symptoms-based diagnostic is unreliable because it's producing false negatives since the doctors aren't used to seeing measles anymore?
Ref. 5: Are you saying that the lack of blinding in a small efficacy study (80% disease in unvaccinated vs 0% in vaccinated) from over 50 years ago proves the vaccine doesn't work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELISA [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralizing_antibody [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:52PM
Interesting...
The Clinical Significance of Measles: A Review. Robert T. Perry and Neal A. Halsey. The Journal of Infectious Diseases 2004; 189(Suppl 1):S4–16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106083 [nih.gov]
pdf here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b7e0/c83a2232536a507ef061563000b59d97db66.pdf [semanticscholar.org]
Once someone gets (full blown) measles they are immune for the rest of their lives. Since everyone is a child at some point and 95% of children got measles, it was pretty much only children that got measles.
No, I'm asking what was the relative contribution of each of those factors to the drop in measles diagnoses?
They have multiple blood tests for measles that don't correlate well with each other, so how are they considered reliable?
Before the vaccine, measles was diagnosed based solely on the symptoms. The vaccine was introduced at around the same time as the blood tests, and the clinical definition of measles was eventually changed to require a confirmatory blood test. The info in those citations shows that 90-99.5% of symptomatic measles cases are not confirmed as measles by the blood tests. Thus, it is possible that 90+% of what was called measles before vaccines and blood tests (~1965) was actually something else. Ie, in the worst case scenario the pre-1964 data here could be 10-200x too high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png [wikipedia.org]
Now the reality is much more messy since the blood tests were not adopted all at once. Some doctors would use it, others wouldnt, and it depended on the situation. Even by 1982, most people were not getting confirmatory tests:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6751071 [nih.gov]
Here we can see the progression of the measles diagnostic criteria. First thing to note is they started the vaccination campaign without even agreeing on the definition of "measles" until 15 years later. Second is the the definition becomes more and more strict over time, eventually only "laboratory confirmed" cases are counted.
1983:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001225.htm [cdc.gov]
1990:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00025629.htm [cdc.gov]
1996:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00047449.htm [cdc.gov]
So before 1979 there was no definition of "measles", it was just up to the doctor to decide. 1983 - 1990 no blood test confirmation was required. From 1990 - 1996 either a case confirmed by a blood test or two "linked" unconfirmed cases counted. And from 1996 onward only lab confirmed cases or a case linked to a confirmed case is counted.
The point is the doctors who know a child was vaccinated are less likely to diagnose measles based on the same symptoms. So you can get a drop in diagnoses just by telling doctors that people were vaccinated.
So to reiterate my point. I want to know how much all these other factors contributed to the drop in cases that were observed. Currently 100% of the drop is being attributed to the vaccine, which we know is wrong.
From ~500K cases/year to under 1K cases/year (~100 in 2018), whats the relative contribution?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:57PM (1 child)
whatever. maybe it's the pesticides. the rate of autism is exploding in such a fashion that it is highly alarming (don't even try to quote big pharma propagandists or their minions in 'government' for the numbers) and until these drug/chemical dealers are held accountable by The People you can't blame some for making their best guesses as to the culprit. these industries are (likely knowingly) making vegetables out of the whole nations' children. 1-2% of the parents are responsible enough to do something about it and the whores of power want to send the pigs in. good luck with that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday October 13 2018, @03:48AM
No, the rate of *diagnosis of autism* is rising, which isn't the same thing. This may be due to more actual autism (possible if we're seeing self-selection for carrier mates), or previously undiagnosed cases now getting diagnosed, or "now that we have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
And it's also become highly fashionable among the Silicon Valley set, as a form of victimhood by proxy.
If it's environmental due to heavy metals or whatever, explain why China, presently drowning in its own pollutants, isn't the world hotbed for autism.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.