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posted by mrpg on Thursday February 28 2019, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the Brawndo-Has-What-Plants-Crave dept.

Texas lawmaker says he's not worried about measles outbreak because of ‘antibiotics'

Texas state representative Bill Zedler says a resurgence of measles across the U.S. isn't worrying him.

Zedler, R-Arlington, is promoting legislation that would allow Texans to opt out of childhood vaccinations.

“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, the Texas Observer reports. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”

There is no treatment for measles, a highly contagious virus that can be fatal. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections and can't kill viruses.

It could be funny if it weren't so tragic.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:40PM (#808076)

    You may notice that the worse affected are the kids under 2. Since they can't be vaccinated until that age, that's the population that really can die. It's like whooping cough. You get vaccinated so that the little kids don't die.

    I know it's really hard for people to understand, but these diseases are deadly to the kids. Just like getting rubella is kind of really bad, for the unborn.

    But yeah, the prolifer crowd kind of ignoring the real life problems like that.

    it was secondary infections that could be treated with antibiotics.

    That's like saying, it's not the high cholesterol or blood pressure or sugar that kills you, it's the heart death due to insufficient blood supply that gets you!

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:24PM (#808088)

    You may notice that the worse affected are the kids under 2. Since they can't be vaccinated until that age, that's the population that really can die.

    False. They can be vaccinated just fine, there is no evidence of any danger. The reason vaccinations are delayed is that they don't work because the infant is already protected by maternal antibodies. A problem is that vaccinated mothers pass on weaker antibodies than those who had measles, so the infants need to be vaccinated at a younger age.

    The recommended age for vaccination in the US changed from 9 months in 1963 to 12 months in 1965 and 15 months in 1976 in response to data showing higher seroconversion rates at older ages in absence of maternal antibodies [7].
    [...]
    The first two studies comparing both groups of infants were conducted in the US [29] and the UK [30]. Women vaccinated with live attenuated measles vaccine had lower amounts of antibodies and passed on shorter term protection against measles to their children (up to the age of 8 months) than naturally infected mothers (up to the age of 11 months). Lennon and Black [29] calculated the proportion of children expected to be susceptible to measles infection and responsive to vaccine by infant's age and mothers birth year cohort in the US. The children of younger mothers appeared to be sooner susceptible to measles infection: measles GMT declined sharply among women with birth-years between 1955 and 1961. This was the cohort vaccinated at the start of vaccination programmes in the US.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21133659 [nih.gov]

    It is because people spread this myth that vaccines are dangerous to infants that we can't move up the vaccination age to protect the children.