There is a measles outbreak in Orange County, California. As always, parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are being blamed and as always, the rhetoric is getting quite nasty. I was just asked how I would respond to people that call non-vaccinating parents idiots. The first thing I would say is that going out and getting vaccinated in mass quantities is likely contributing to the spread, since the MMR vaccine is a live virus vaccination and people who receive it are contagious and can spread the vaccine-strain to others for up to a month after vaccination. I would also say that the MMR vaccine has a long history of vaccine-failure and it is common for those who are fully vaccinated to contract measles. It is also not uncommon for the vaccine itself to cause measles infection in those who receive it. The article does not say anything about the vaccination status of those who are infected. It is common for the media to fail to report the percentage of those infected who are fully vaccinated and who have been recently vaccinated. With regard to the last sentence, in which the author refers to infants as most vulnerable, I would emphasize that we have the vaccine to thank for that. Prior to the measles vaccine, basically every woman in the U.S. caught measles as a child and recovered from it without any lasting complications. Getting wild measles and recovering from it, as nature intended, not only gave protection against allergies and asthma, and strengthened the immune system, it also provided LIFELONG immunity, which was passed to the womans offspring and protected the infant during that most vulnerable first year of life. Anectdotally... I have seen children in private practice (children diagnosed with autism), who have viral titers against measles that are many times the level necessary to demonstrate immunity. These are the same kids who regressed after their 12-15 month vaccines and who have horrific gastrointestinal disease, which developed within a very short time of MMR vaccination. Andrew Wakefields observations have been replicated many times in several different countries, and whether people choose to believe it or not, the measles virus does infect some children and they develop chronic measles infection as a result of the vaccine. It seems to me that if I have seen this in small town SW Indiana, it is very likely to be happening everywhere, and it is most likely to result in more infections in areas of the country where there is a larger population (aka, Orange County, California). Those children who have extremely high viral titers may be carrying active measles infection and may be contagious to others they come in contact with - not because they werent vaccinated... because they WERE vaccinated, and there was something about their immune systems that altered the way they responded to the vaccine. Without laboratory testing to determine if the virus that is causing the outbreak is the wild measles virus or vaccine strain, there is no way to know the origin of the outbreak. cbsnews/news/measles-outbreak-in-orange-county-california-worst-in-decades/
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 18:26:28 +0000
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