Why measles Vaccination is a good Idea?
Before we read this news in detail let us see what measles…is…?
Also you will see how the bad research (Medical fraud revealed in discredited vaccine-autism study) makes people think twice before vaccination.
What is measles?
Measles is a highly contagious, serious disease caused by a virus. In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year. It remains one of the leading causes of death among young children globally, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine. An estimated 139 300 people died from measles in 2010 – mostly children under the age of five.
What is Cause?
Measles is caused by a virus in the paramyxovirus family. The measles virus normally grows in the cells that line the back of the throat and lungs. Measles is a human disease and is not known to occur in animals.
How to stop?
Accelerated immunization activities have had a major impact on reducing measles deaths. From 2001 to 2011 more than one billion children aged 9 months to 14 years who live in high risk countries were vaccinated against the disease. Global measles deaths have decreased by 74% from 535 300 in 2000 to 139 300 in 2010
Vaccine Recommendations
Children
CDC recommends all children get two doses of MMR vaccine, starting with the first dose at 12 through 15 months of age, and the second dose at 4 through 6 years of age. Children can receive the second dose earlier as long as it is at least 28 days after the first dose.
Students at post-high school educational institutions
Students at post-high school educational institutions who do not have evidence of immunity #immunity) against measles need two doses of MMR vaccine, separated by at least 28 days.
Adults
Adults who do not have evidence of immunity against measles should get at least one dose of MMR vaccine
This isn’t the failure of a vaccine; it’s the failure to vaccinate
Today, though, some parents don’t have their children immunized for a variety of reasons. They may have heard, erroneously, that the vaccines are not safe. For instance, in the late 1990s, former medical researcher Andrew Wakefield published a report that said he had linked the MMR vaccine to the onset of autism. That report was later discredited and retracted from the medical journal The Lancet. But the damage was done.
A study in the medical journal Pediatrics found that in 2000, 2.1 percent of U.S. children who received other recommended vaccines did not get the MMR vaccine, an increase from 0.77 percent in 1995. According to CDC director Tom Frieden, M.D., MPH, measles, long considered a dormant disease, is “resurging, with 175 confirmed cases and 20 hospitalizations so far this year. ”This isn’t the failure of a vaccine; it’s the failure to vaccinate,” Frieden said, adding that parents “should protect their children by making sure they’ve had two doses of measles vaccine. So do your homework, moms and dads. Protect your children by getting them immunized on time
In recent times we are hearing lot about many cases of measles in US and Canada. Measles was supposedly stamped out years ago, along with whooping cough, polio and other nasty maladies. But now it’s made a comeback, thanks to people who don’t believe in vaccinations. France, northern England and Wales have all been hit with serious measles outbreaks. Wales alone has had 1,200 cases since November of last year, mostly among children and adolescents under 18. Dozens more cases have appeared in pockets of the United States. In Canada has recorded 30 cases in 2013, including eight in B.C. since June. “It’s been three years since we have seen measles in B.C.,” Dr. Paul Martiquet of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority told Canadian Press.
Reason why people are afraid of vaccination?
The modern anti-vaccination scare began in the late 1990s, when a British physician named Andrew Wakefield began warning people that the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) causes autism in children. Medical experts refuted his claims, but parents panicked. Vaccination rates in Britain sank from 92 per cent to 73 per cent. Dr. Wakefield’s research has since been widely condemned as a giant fraud, and many of the current crop of measles victims were never vaccinated because of him.
Medical fraud revealed in discredited vaccine-autism study
On Feb. 28, 1998, The Lancet published a research paper entitled “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.”
It was a blockbuster.
Gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and associates examined the cases of 12 children with bowel disease, nine of whom suffered “behavioural abnormalities” shortly after receiving the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The paper suggested that the MMR vaccine triggered autism, particularly in children with intestinal abnormalities. The “new syndrome” they had discovered was named enteritis/disintegrative disorder.Dr. Wakefield said the vaccine was dangerous and called for an end to MMR vaccination – the cornerstone of childhood immunization programs. He wanted it replaced by three separate shots.The media – and Britain’s infamous tabloids in particular – were all over it.
It was a perfect storm of a story, coming as it did when autism rates were soaring, parents were tiring of seeing their children become pin-cushions for vaccines, and a new communications tool called the Internet was booming.Scientists around the world diligently tried to reproduce the findings but never found any evidence of a link between MMR vaccine and autism.With the passage of time, it became abundantly clear that the research was profoundly flawed, scientifically and ethically.Still, Dr. Wakefield became the darling of anti-vaccinationists and a hero to parents desperately searching for answers to their children’s autism. He painted himself as a pioneering scientist who was being persecuted by Big Bad Pharma.
Dr. Wakefield, it turns out, was something else altogether. He was on the payroll of a group that has launched a lawsuit against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine – at $230 an hour – and his research was going to be the centrepiece of their claim. He patented a measles vaccine that he wanted to replace the MMR shot. (Later, he founded an autism research centre in Texas.) We know this, in large part, because of the diligent work of a single investigative journalist.
In 2004, Brian Deer of The Sunday Times published damning evidence about Dr. Wakefield’s ties to the lawsuit, showing that the children in the study were recruited unethically, and exposing other flaws in the published study.
As a result of that exposé, Dr. Wakefield was eventually investigated by Britain’s General Medical Council and stripped of his licence to practise because of dishonesty. (The second author, Dr. John Walker-Smith, also lost his licence to practise medicine.) In February, 2010, the original Lancet paper was retracted. But Dr. Wakefield continues to insist the findings are valid and that he is the victim of a vast conspiracy. Yet he has never been able to reproduce the findings.
Now, thanks again to Brian Deer, we know why.In this week’s edition of the British Medical Journal, the journalist shows, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Dr. Wakefield’s work was not just scientifically flawed but “an elaborate fraud.”It is troubling enough that so much credence was given to a study that involved only 12 children from a single clinic in the first place. But it turns out that Dr. Wakefield recruited them selectively to fit his thesis – largely from members of an anti-vaccination group called JABS.Mr. Deer found that every single one of the 12 cases reported in the original Lancet paper was misrepresented; medical records, diagnoses and medical histories were altered to ensure that the symptoms of autism arose within two weeks of MMR vaccination.Three of the nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism at all. Despite the claim that all 12 children were “previously normal,” five had documented developmental problems long before their shots. In nine cases, the children did not have bowel abnormalities but the records were altered.Remember, the paper claimed that all the symptoms began, on average, within six days of MMR vaccination. In fact they occurred months, sometimes years, before and after vaccination.
Parents of 11 of the 12 children blamed MMR vaccine for their children’s health problems before they were recruited. In fact, all were referred by anti-vaccine campaigners and the study was commissioned and funded by a lawyer who planned a class-action lawsuit.Perhaps most damning of all is the revelation that two years before the Lancet paper was published, Richard Barr, the lawyer who hired Dr. Wakefield to help with the class-action lawsuit against vaccine makers, sent a letter to his clients looking for children with bowel disorders and autism.In other words, Dr. Wakefield already had the makings of a syndrome he was going to “discover” two years later – and the “proof” he needed for a lawsuit – and recruited study participants accordingly. Research fraud happens, though rarely on this scale. The real tragedy is that many otherwise intelligent people have come to believe the purported MMR-autism link, and the health of a lot of children has been endangered as a result. In Britain, childhood vaccination rates fell to as low as 80 per cent, allowing a return of measles, mumps and rubella. Thankfully, those rates are climbing back up again.It is hard to imagine that the greed and arrogance of one man could do so much damage. Hopefully, the diligent work of Mr. Deer has put the final nail in the coffin of Dr. Wakefield’s career of fraud and deception. In Canada, the good news is that the new infections have been imported from elsewhere, either from infected people who travelled to Canada and passed it along, or from Canadians who were infected abroad. The bad news is that Canada’s vaccination rate is just 85 per cent – lower than it should be to confer population immunity. Our worst recent outbreak occurred in 2011, when 725 people came down with it in Quebec.
Even though Dr. Wakefield was thoroughly disgraced, anti-vaxxers aren’t hard to find. Plenty of chiropractors, homeopaths and other practitioners of “natural” medicine believe vaccines are unnecessary or dangerous. Activist-actress Jenny McCarthy (the new girl on The View) has been waging a high-profile war on childhood vaccines for years. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental activist, is another anti-vax crackpot. He’s claimed that we’re poisoning our children with thimerosal, a preservative in vaccines, and that a vast conspiracy of government agencies has covered up the truth. Some anti-vaxxers belong to fringe religious groups. But some are highly educated, hyper-vigilant, holistically minded parents who believe the environment is full of toxic substances that are potential threats to their children. Some think the medical establishment has no right to tell them what to do.“Measles is not a life-threatening disease,” goes one typical online comment. “Parents have every right not to vaccinate their children, especially when big pharma still uses toxins such as mercury (still in flu shots) and aluminum (still in most infant/child vaccines).” These people get plenty of affirmation on the Internet, which is a bottomless cornucopia of junk science and scare stories.
It’s true that measles rarely kills. But it can have serious side effects, including deafness and pneumonia. It travels the globe at the speed of airplanes. It is also easy to prevent and totally unnecessary. In some countries, and also some Canadian provinces, you have to get your kids vaccinated or else they can’t go to school. Good idea. As we learned with seat belts, a little coercion can be a good thing.
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