Contributors

Thursday, July 02, 2015

Death by Measles

Two days ago Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that eliminated religious and personal-belief exemptions for vaccinations of California schoolchildren. This was in response to an outbreak of measles in Disneyland last December that infected at least 150 people.

The whining started immediately. Jim Carrey ranted on Twitter, "California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory [sic] vaccines. This corporate fascist must be stopped."

The thing is, thimerosal has long been removed from most childhood vaccines:
By 2001, Thimerosal was removed from most vaccines in North America and Europe. It was gradually replaced by other non mercury compounds, and some vaccines have been formulated so they don't need preservatives.
But the number of autism cases continues to rise, a trend discovered as early as 2008. Why? Probably because other environmental toxins, such as a neuro-toxic pesticides, still abound, and parents are waiting longer to have children: there's a link between parental age and autism: "autism rates were 66 percent higher among children born to dads over 50 years of age than among those born to dads in their 20s. Autism rates were 28 percent higher when dads were in their 40s versus 20s."

There are, however, people who really do need exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws: people allergic to vaccine components and those with compromised immune systems.

One such person was a woman in rural Washington who recently died from the measles. This was the first such death in the United States in 12 years. A measles epidemic from 1989-1991 killed 123 children. One of the outbreaks was in Philadelphia where two church groups had religious objections to vaccines. Six children there died, mostly because parents refused medical care.

If everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated, society develops "herd immunity." Isolated cases of measles (usually from international travelers) are stopped cold because no one else can be infected. But when lots of people aren't vaccinated, measles spreads like wildfire and can kill vulnerable individuals. To make it worse, not all victims of measles develop the most common symptom: the woman who died never had a rash. She died from pneumonia, a common consequence of the disease, and the measles infection wasn't discovered until after she died.

Anyway, when Jim Carrey divorced Jenny McCarthy why didn't he dump her silly ideas too? He should go back to ranting about Fox News and mocking Charlton Heston.

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