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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 01 2015, @12:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-bed-bugs-will-be-next dept.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/30/vaccine-campaign-leads-to-elimination-of-rubella-in-the-americas/

Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) got together with the Pan American Health Organization to announce some promising news: there have been no new transmissions of the rubella virus in the entire Western Hemisphere since 2009. As a result, the virus has been declared eliminated in this region, joining smallpox and polio on that elite list.

Rubella, commonly called the German measles, doesn't cause severe symptoms in the vast majority of infected individuals. If a pregnant woman is infected, however, the disease can cause miscarriages or a suite of birth defects. Before the advent of an effective vaccine, the WHO says that up to 20,000 children a year in Latin America and the Caribbean were born with rubella-related birth defects; that's also the number that occurred during the last major outbreak in the US.

The widespread use of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, and rubella) is partly to thank for the virus' elimination. Caribbean countries also used an adult vaccination program to help cut transmission in their populations. As a result, the last infection with a local origin occurred in 2009. Since then, several cases have been reported within the hemisphere, but all have traced back to infections overseas.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @04:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @04:46PM (#177508)

    You don't need to understand chaos to change the weather enough to be able to direct it, you just have to be able to create the conditions we know weather needs to exist which will cause said weather to form. I mean I'm not talking perfect weather all the time, but rudimentary weather changes, sure we can do those now. Then you can create the climate for the dinos to thrive at your very own dino park in the middle of Kansas..because let's face it Kansas has it coming.