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Anti-vaccine nonsense spurred NY's largest outbreak in decades
Health officials in New York are cautiously optimistic that they have a large measles outbreak under control after tackling the noxious anti-vaccine myths and unfounded fears that fueled the disease's spread.
Since last fall, New York has tallied 177 confirmed cases of measles, the largest outbreak the state has seen in decades. It began with infected travelers, arriving from parts of Israel and Europe where the highly contagious disease was spreading. In New York, that spread has largely been confined to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. As measles rippled through those insular religious communities, health officials ran into members who were wary of outsiders as well as those who harbor harmful myths and fears about vaccines. This included the completely false-yet-pernicious belief that the measles vaccine causes autism.
To quash the outbreak, health officials met with rabbis and pediatricians in the community, who in turned urged community members to be vigilant and, above all, get vaccinated, according to The New York Times. "Good people, great parents were terrified," Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, founder of Darchei Noam yeshiva in Monsey in Rockland County, told the Times. Despite the fears, he insisted parents vaccinate their children. "They felt that I was asking to give their children something that would harm them."
(Score: 2, Touché) by nitehawk214 on Friday January 18 2019, @10:57PM (5 children)
Seasonally outbreaks in communities with a lot of anti-vaxers.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @11:31PM (4 children)
The point is that if it is seasonal, it is always circulating. And there's like 20k cases of "measles-like" illness in the US every year caused by unknown virii, measles is ruled out due to negative antibody tests that dont even correlate with each other.
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]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 [nih.gov]
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday January 19 2019, @01:49PM (2 children)
There's the measles-like. And, there's the polio-like. They say, "oh, look at the Polio going away!" Because, somebody gets Polio. Goes to the Doctor. And the Doctor, so many times, doesn't want to say Polio. And look very foolish. Because, hardly anybody gets Polio. Supposedly. So the Doctor says maybe M. S. or other things. Not Polio. And the so-called M. S. is going up and up. As the Polio, supposedly, goes down very low. It's a beautiful sight. If you don't know what's really happening there.
And by the way, A. D. E. M. Not the Bible guy. This one is the disease that people get after they get the Polio shot. They don't call it Polio. But it eats and eats and eats at your Brains & Nerves. So horrible!!!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @02:05PM (1 child)
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/135/Supplement_1/S16.2 [aappublications.org]
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/is-india-actually-free-of-polio/article7945687.ece [thehindu.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 21 2019, @03:07PM
"Clinically" is not good enough. If it's not an actual infection by polio virus, then it's not polio. As with measles, there are other illnesses that can mimic polio, and these need not be infectious. Plus, in a country of over a billion people with a sudden increase in concern and awareness of polio-like illnesses, they're going to see a bunch of them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 21 2019, @03:02PM
Sorry that is a fallacy in more than one way. Just because someone orders a test for measles-like symptoms doesn't mean that a virus was the cause. And you're still way, way shy of the number of observed cases of measles prior to 1960 even if we choose to pretend that all those cases would be reported as measles prior to 1960. On the second link, there's nothing relevant (this would be the non sequitur fallacy). A common measles test has a slight false negative rate. They're not going to miss 20k cases of measles as a result.