Tag: vaccination

“Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health budgets. ”

This article started out depressing and ended up alarming. Here a parent talks about how he has not sought medical care, screening or otherwise, except for one ER visit, for his three chirdren:

His children — 6 months old, 8 and 12 — were all born at home. Aside from one visit to an emergency room for a bruised finger, none of them has ever been to a doctor, and they’re all healthy, he says, except for the occasional sore throat or common cold.

Wait, you have three kids, aged 6 months to 12 years, and there has only been one medical visit between all three? No health screenings? Nothing? Wow.

“It’s much more soothing to trust emergency medicine than a vaccine, which for me is like playing Russian roulette,” he says.

Saying the quote points to someone detached from reality is an understatement. At this point in my public health career I have never, ever, ever, ever heard someone say that acute emergency care was preferable to preventive care. 

From the CDC:

Usually there are about 60 cases per year [of measles], but 2013 saw a spike in American communities – some 175 cases and counting – virtually all linked to people who brought the infection home after foreign travel.

Three-fold increase since last year. Why is this so? What happened in Brooklyn helps tell the story:

A total of 58 cases were identified, including six generations of measles infection in two neighborhoods of the borough of Brooklyn. All cases were in members of the orthodox Jewish community. No case was identified in a person who had documented measles vaccination at the time of exposure; 12 (21%) of the cases were in infants too young (aged <12 months) for routine immunization with measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Of note, they were all aged 0-32. The 12 who were too young to be vaccinated could have been protected via herd immunity.

This is what the anti-vaccine movement has brought us.