Strollerderby

"Almost half" implies that more than half of the cases were from vaccinated children – right?

Actually, some of those cases are children under a year of age (too young to have been offered the MMR) who have the misfortune to live in the same community as a child whose parents have refused to vaccinate.  

Listen to last week's "Ruining it for the Rest of Us" episode of This American Life to hear an interesting account of a recent measles outbreak in a California community.

www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx

No MMR vaccine has contained mercury for over 5 years in the US.  In fact, with the exception of some flu shots, mercury (as thimerosal) has not been present in any childhood vaccine since 2001. This is despite convincing evidence that the preservative amount of mercury in a vaccine was not harmful.   Nevertheless, the mercury was removed.  This has had no effect on the incidence of Autism diagnoses - in fact the number of diagnoses continues to climb.  Undeterred, the anti-vaccine activists conveniently changed all of their literature and propaganda away from the evils of mercury and are now beating the drum of 'other' chemicals that are to blame.  

The tragedy of un-vaccinated and vulnerable children is only made more horrific by the enormous amount of energy and resources going to implicate vaccines when there is so much legitimate work to be done to solve the mystery and treat the issues of autism.  

Finally, while vaccinatrix is right that many of the recent children who have gotten measles are under 1, some of the kids have been vaccinated.  It's vaccine.  Not a suit of armor.  If other children in the community are not vaccinated and get the disease, a vaccinated kid is less likely to get it, but not completely immune.  

Betty said it best, but I am constantly amazed at how few people understand vaccines and their statistical efficacy. People who do not vaccinate put not only their own children at risk, but vaccinated children as well because it's impossible to know who is vulnerable. They increase the risks for all of us.

Betty said it best, but I am constantly amazed at how few people understand vaccines and their statistical efficacy. People who do not vaccinate put not only their own children at risk, but vaccinated children as well because it's impossible to know who is vulnerable. They increase the risks for all of us.

The concept of 'herd immunity' is critical to understanding how we control measles.  It's refreshing to hear Babble offer an alternate view to the antivax psychobabble permeating the web.

I agree - thanks Babble for showing both sides of a very complicated and emotional issue!

Thanks for doing a post on this! I know you start by mentioning that Babble does a lot of stories on the potential dangers of vaccines, but the fact is that there is currently no scientific evidence showing a vaccine-autism link, which is what most of these stories are about. This is why I recommended this article - it shows very strong, real evidence of the benefits of vaccines, but for some reason stories like this get much less coverage. This causes a lot of work to be created to assure people that vaccines are safe, when we could be spending that time/money to find a real cause of autism.

btw, when you talk about the recent outbreak of measles in the US, and that almost half of these kids didn't get vaccinated - remember that the great majority of kids in this country actually do get vaccinated. Say that about 90% of kids get the measles vaccine. That means that a much higher percentage of non-vaccinated kids actually got the measles than a percentage of vaccinated kids. (I hope that makes sense. Sometimes I can't articulate my thoughts quite clearly, especially this late at night!)

Oh, and I also agree with everything BettyWu said.

Actually, Betty Wu said part of it wrong, and in doing so illustrates at how often people on both sides of the debate parrot things they actually do not understand.

The MMR has NEVER had mercury in it, as it is a live virus vaccine and adding thimerosal would in fact kill the viruses in it.

The date the pediatric schedule was "cleaned" of mercury is also false.  The FDA in 1999 requested that the pharmaceutical companies phase out thimerosal as a preservative because children at that time would be subject to hundreds of times as much mercury as allowed under both EPA and FDA guidelines in 4 bolus exposures.  Pharma responded that it would take a couple of years, but that they would work on it.  Different vaccines take different amounts of time to make, so even if Pharma had formulation that were already licensed by the FDA, the soonest these vaccines could be brought to market was 2001.  

In an effort to avoid having a time when there would be no vaccines available, the FDA agreed to continue using the formulations with thimerosal as a preservative until the new vaccines were ready.  This did not occur in 2001 for all products, and the products which were ready by then where not universally used until what was already on the shelves was gone.  The actual time when the pediatric schedule was thimerosal-as-a-preservative-free was 2003-2004 (nobody is really sure one way or the other because the CDC did not gather the data on it), but then in 2004 they added 4 flu shots which contained as much thimerosal as the three Hep B's and one of the IPV's that they had "cleaned".  A thimerosal-free flu vaccine is now available, but according to the records kept by the CDC the US does not buy enough doses to provide for ALL children and pregnant mothers to get them, so some children are still being exposed to full doses of thimerosal, even in the womb when they are even more vulnerable.

Additionally, the DTaP still contains thimerosal, as does two of the formulation of Hep B.  Thimerosal was not only used as a preservative, but also as a "fixing" agent in the making of the toxoids which provide the antigens.  And in some vaccines, the need for a preservative has led Pharma to use aluminum, which although not as neurotoxic as mercury still can cause problems with central nervous system development, especially when you consider thimerosal was typically 12.5-25 mu of mercury per dose, but the aluminum is in the neighborhood of 1200-1400 mu per dose.

I am not saying that thimerosal was, is or was never a factor in the rise in autism that we saw since the late 80's. What I am saying is that Federal regulators and Pharma-funded researchers have by no means ruled it out, any more than you would expect the govt.s of NC or VA to partner with RJR and Liggett to determine whether tobacco causes heart disease and lung cancer.  As long as the people who push vaccination refuse to openliy discuss the dangers inherrant with the products in a manner that people can trust you are going to have problems getting the masses to buy it.

And people like Offit who has 104 million reasons to be pro-vaccine regardless of the collateral damage make damn poor spokesmen.