SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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?