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from the have-you-ever-seen-a-single-mump? dept.
Kami Altenberg Schaal has been a professional nurse for 22 years. She is pro-vaccine. She gets the flu shot every year as a requirement for her employment, and she vaccinates her family.
[...] Her entire family has been vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, and yet 4 out of 5 members of her family came down with the mumps. Her daughter is a freshman in college, and got the mumps from school.
[...] She isolated her daughter for 5 days ("I know how to isolate a patient, I'm a nurse"), and reported her case to the department of health.
All the members of her family also got booster shots of the MMR vaccine.
17 days after her daughter's exposure, her husband and son woke up with mumps.
After notifying the health department, Kami notified her son's school district as well.
What happened next was apparently something she had not anticipated. Even though her family was fully vaccinated and she followed all the proper medical protocols for dealing with the mumps, many people in her community began to blame her, including some of her medical colleagues, for not vaccinating their children (even though she had!)
[...] Finally, Kami herself woke up with the mumps. She had been tested and was supposedly immune. She had taken the booster. But she ended up getting the mumps anyway.
[...] The department of health nurse was required to send out another letter to the school district, so Kami asked the nurse if she could "put the truth" in the letter to the school district that her son was vaccinated, because she feared being blamed in error, once again, for not vaccinating her children.
The nurse allegedly replied "no."
They will not put that in a letter, because it could give the anti-vaxx movement some fodder.
So they would not protect my family by saying we did the right things, so I had to protect my family. I'm the one who has to defend my family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:16AM (2 children)
Why would you assume these cases are independent of one another?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:38PM (1 child)
There may well be a genetic component, in either the family or the strain of mumps that attacked them. But assuming independence sets a lower bound on the probabilities. Assuming they did their math right, you would expect 9/10,000 groups of five exposed people to all develop mumps. Any non-independent factors in play would increase the number of fully infected groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:22PM
Not just a genetic component, they probably got vaccinated at the same place, etc.