Disneyland: The Latest Victim of the Anti-Vaxxers

[Arkain2K]

The so-called happiest place on Earth is the source of a continuous outbreak of a rare but potentially serious disease.

A measles outbreak began at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, when an infected person visited the park in December. It has now infected at least 20 people in three different states, with two new cases reported in Orange County on Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times. As the airborne disease spreads, so too does the debate about the need for vaccinations in America.

While the virus with flu-like symptoms is still common in many parts of the world, measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, owing to a highly effective vaccination program. But the formerly eradicated disease is now increasingly on the rise in the U.S., with a record number of more than 610 cases reported last year. That number is nearly triple the previous high in 2011, and the majority of those cases involve unvaccinated patients.

Those numbers are indicative of a larger trend in which many parents are choosing not to vaccinate their kids. While she’s since backpedaled on her anti-vaccine stance, Jenny McCarthy became the celebrity face of the anti-vaccine movement years ago when she pointed to autism as a side effect of vaccines, a claim that is not supported by scientific evidence.

In 2014, parents who refused to vaccinate their kids were blamed for an outbreak of potentially fatal whooping cough in unlikely places: the wealthy, elite neighborhoods of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, California, where up to 70 percent of parents filed “personal belief exemptions” from vaccinations with their children’s schools, according to the The Hollywood Reporter. As a result, their vaccination rate was as low as that of Chad or South Sudan, The Atlantic concluded.

The latest measles outbreak isn’t just a PR nightmare for Disneyland. It’s also a larger side effect of the anti-vaccination movement in America. And despite McCarthy’s accusations, vaccines may be the only way to restore faith in the happiest place on Earth—and many other places in the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/anti-vaccination-movement-blame-disneyland-measles-outbreak-205657288.html

 

[Arkain2K]

Wealthy L.A. Schools' Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan's

If you can do yoga on a paddleboard, you can get an MMR vaccine.

When actors play doctors on TV, that does not make them actual doctors. And that does not mean they should scour some Internet boards, confront their pediatricians, and demand fewer vaccinations for their children, as some Hollywood parents in Los Angeles have apparently been doing.

The Hollywood Reporter has a great investigation for which it sought the vaccination records of elementary schools all over Los Angeles County. They found that vaccination rates in elite neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills have tanked, and the incidence of whooping cough there has skyrocketed.

Here's a map of the schools with dangerously low vaccination rates (an interactive version is on their site). Note how the schools cluster together as little red dots all over the wealthy, crazy Westside—not unlike crimson spots on a measles patient:

Parents in these schools are submitting a form called a "personal belief exemption," which states that they are not vaccinating their kids due to "a diffuse constellation of unproven anxieties, from allergies and asthma to eczema and seizures," reporter Gary Baum writes.

In some schools, up to 60 to 70 percent of parents have filed these PBEs, indicating a vaccination rate as low as that of Chad or South Sudan. Unlike in Santa Monica, however, parents in South Sudan have trouble getting their children vaccinated because of an ongoing civil war.

And lo, it is these very same L.A. neighborhoods that are experiencing a resurgence of diseases like whooping cough, otherwise known as pertussis. Measles cases have also hit a high in California this year.

To be clear, not all PBEs are evidence of an anti-vaxxer parent. Schools require either a PBE or an up-to-date shot record for school attendance, and sometimes parents submit them if they simply aren't able to get the shots done on time. Still, the L.A. Times has previously reported that the percentage of kindergartens in which at least 8 percent of students were not fully vaccinated because of the parent's beliefs had more than doubled since 2007, and private-school parents were likelier to file the PBEs than their public-school counterparts. The paper found that the exemption rate for all of Santa Monica and Malibu was 15 percent.

The Hollywood Reporter interviewed several Westside doctors who seem to encourage this kind of vaccine roulette, as well as several area school administrators who seem only vaguely aware of the risk.

“I’d prefer that children be immunized," Shari Latta, director of Children’s Creative Workshop in Malibu, told THR. "We’ve been fortunate to avoid any outbreaks.”

So fortunate! If only there were something parents could do to improve those fortunes ... a way to, say, inoculate their families against the tragedy of untreatable disease.

The anti-vaxxer turn is a frustrating development for a city that's obsessed with health and fitness. There are very few things that we know prevent sickness without a doubt. The "Beaming" juice at L.A.'s Cafe Gratitude, which consists of carrot juice, camu-camu, and astralagus, and which is surely delicious and beam-inducing, is not one. Vaccines are.

It's tempting to suggest, as some of Baum's L.A. sources do, that these are just concerned, well-meaning parents who, along with forbidding processed food and dragging their offspring to baby yoga, also avoid any medications that aren't strictly "natural." (Of course, vaccines are natural—they're derived from the naturally-occurring pathogen itself.)

That kind of thinking ignores the way vaccines work, through herd immunity. A community can only be protected when 92 percent or more of a population is immunized, and many of L.A.'s elementary schools are dipping far below that number. These parents aren't just risking their own kids' health, they're risking everyone's.

Wealth enables these people to hire fringe pediatricians who will coddle their irrational beliefs. But it doesn't entitle them to threaten an entire city's children with terrifying, 19th-century diseases for no reason.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...tion-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/

 

[weed]

anti-Vaccites?

 

[KILL KILL]

People in LA also invented the "cookie diet", so I wouldn't expect anything less.

 

[weed]

our LA office is filled with the laziest people with the poorest work ethic ever. don't get me started haha

 

[James Keith]

(Of course, vaccines are natural

 

[Lord_Impaler]

Why the fuck does everything get a stupid little nickname now?

Annoying as shit.

 

[Like A Bas]

Vaccination conspiracy theorists really turn my stomach. I can deal with all the 9/11, Illuminati, whatever stuff- you can actually learn some very interesting, obscure things when you're poking around in that world. But these assholes who are putting kids at risk on lies, usually just to be contrarian or fashionable in their circles, or to feed their paranoia greed (nod to judothrow), they fucking suck.

 

[Damien Karras]

sometimes I wonder if all of California is in a vacuum of sorts

 

[DizzyYeahYeah]

Vaccination conspiracy theorists really turn my stomach. I can deal with all the 9/11, Illuminati, whatever stuff- you can actually learn some very interesting, obscure things when you're poking around in that world. But these assholes who are putting kids at risk on lies, usually just to be contrarian or fashionable in their circles, or to feed their paranoia greed (nod to judothrow), they fucking suck.

I'd say I'm a conspiracy theorists but vaccines probably work. If I had kids, I'd get them vaccinated.

 

[Pelosi2020]

Do the little red dots represent the measles???

 

[jk7707]

I'd say I'm a conspiracy theorists but vaccines probably work. If I had kids, I'd get them vaccinated.

There isn't any "probably" about it. They DO work and they've saved hundreds of millions of lives over the last few hundred years. There is a reason why life expectancy in the 1400's was about 35.

 

[IDL]

If you are worried about it, get teh injection

 

[James Keith]

There isn't any "probably" about it. They DO work and they've saved hundreds of millions of lives over the last few hundred years. There is a reason why life expectancy in the 1400's was about 35.

The only time I ever got a flu vaccine I came home and within about two days came down with the flu. True story.

 

[jk7707]

The only time I ever got a flu vaccine I came home and within about two days came down with the flu. True story.

Well shit, that settles it then....

 

[CombatCyborg]

I have a close childhood friend who has become obsessed with the vaccine controversy. Everything he shares on Facebook is related to anti-vaccination. I worry for him.

For certain things like the flu, I always took it for granted that vaccines are unnecessary. But what about things like the TwinRx vaccine (hepatitis)? Or when I travelled a few years ago, I got I think a malaria and yellow fever vaccine. Those seem important and completely practical, to me.

 

[SpidermanISGOAT]

Vaccination for primarily the poor and 3rd world people should be the highest priority.

They are most at risk of infection and we need to save them.

Honestly we need to start forcing the vaccines on people by force. They need to become mandatory to attend school or work in any office building let alone factory.

No vaccine? That's fine than you can't draw social security, welfare, medicaid, work, or attend school.

 

[Pelosi2020]

Honestly we need to start forcing the vaccines on people by force. They need to
become mandatory to attend school or work in any office building let alone factory.

The Disneyland incident shows us that even public places can be the spreading grounds for these incredibly contagious and deadly diseases.

We need to start forcing the vaccines on people by force. No exceptions.

 

[jefferz]

The only time I ever got a flu vaccine I came home and within about two days came down with the flu. True story.

It's all over. Time to quit creating and using vaccines. We have definitive proof now that vaccines don't work.
Lock the thread, call the drug companies, and gods sake talk to the doctors.
Will someone please think of the children!

 

[Ayin]

It's all over. Time to quit creating and using vaccines. We have definitive proof now that vaccines don't work.
Lock the thread, call the drug companies, and gods sake talk to the doctors.
Will someone please think of the children!

You mock, but that is the rebuttal I most often hear to talk of vaccines, the classic 'I got the Flu vaccine last year and got sick'.