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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: 4, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:47PM (3 children)
But if actual test shows that you're immune then what is exact mechanism of actually catching the disease? Is it some other strain that this immunity doesn't work against? After all nature doesn't work like this, nothing happens at strictly set random ratios for unknowable reasons.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @03:04PM
Don't know about mumps, but for measles the different types of blood tests don't even correlate with each other:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 [nih.gov]
It is also not known how well either test result correlates with actual protection from exposure. They just assume "antibodies above a certain level -> protected".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Taibhsear on Tuesday April 30 2019, @03:15PM (1 child)
I was also thinking this. If her whole family got it I wonder if there is some gene they carry that causes the immune response to not work as well for mumps. Perhaps a different structure to a cellular surface protein. It says they had antibodies for the virus so at least their immune system responded to the vaccine. Which could mean that the virus they were infected with might be a new strain that isn't affected by the antibodies generated by the response to the vaccine. Them having the antibodies would also rule out the specific vaccine they got being ineffective or improperly made or contaminated or something. Seems like a lot of research could be done on their situation to learn more about the disease and their genetic mechanisms.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:41PM
I was wondering is the mumps virus had mutated to be immune to the vaccine.
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