Kind of scary. Here in the San Francisco Bay area I had a bad cough a few weeks ago for the first time in a long time. I felt bad for taking BART into SF and potentially getting others sick. A lot of people have been sick, working from home. Probably not related.
I guess he meant "they reported it first, instead of any other major US news outlet"
This is exactly what I meant. In hindsight, I hadn't checked other news outlets (it's clearly evident that they had already reported on the topic), and I suppose it's not all that strange because there may well be BBC representatives in California, or at least in touch with people in California. It was a very poorly thought out comment, and I apologize.
> PHILADELPHIA – UPDATE: The research study authors related that there are now between 20 and 25 reported, suspected cases of this polio-like syndrome. Researchers have identified a polio-like syndrome in a cluster of children from California over a one-year period, according to a case report released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014.
There's no reason to have a physical presence in California. For example, the writer might be on a mailing list for announcements from the AAN, and perhaps even access to the embargoed information. Make a few phone calls (including to the researchers in California) and the article is done.
Reminder that vaccines may not always be safe. Often when vaccine safety comes up, people with concern are "voted down".` The fact is, not all immune systems are the same and some cannot handle particular vaccines. An attitude of "most scientists think it's safe" is not real science; it's a appeal to authority. We need to figure out why some are endangered by some vaccines.
No -- An attitude of "someone on HN says 'vaccines may not always be safe'" is not real science.
Unless you want to provide any actual studies to back up your claim, you're just spouting the sort of pseudoscience that gets children killed.
While it's true that some very small percent of the population can have an allergic reaction to some vaccines, the risk of your child dying from, say, polio is much much higher than the risk of him/her dying from the vaccine.
> the risk of your child dying from, say, polio is much much higher than the risk of him/her dying from the vaccine.
That isn't the case, assuming you're non-Amish in the US is it? The last naturally occurring case of polio in the United States was in 1979, and health officials consider the disease eliminated in the Western Hemisphere. So your risk of contracting wild polio is effectively 0.
If the death risk of the polio vaccine is 1:1,000,000, you would still have a higher risk of dying from the vaccine.
NB: I believe in vaccines, but I don't think it's wise to try and make arguments in the quoted way.
What about herd immunity?
We all need to get the vaccine so that those who definitely cannot are protected from the fact that they cannot contract it from anyone around them.
Polio still exists, and not vaccinating yourself might just start to wear away at that defense.
Earlier this year, researchers confirmed that a 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California, the nation's worst in over 50 years, was spread by children whose parents applied for non-medical exemptions to school vaccination requirements, many for religious reasons.http://www.healthline.com/health-news/children-anti-vaccinat...
> So your risk of contracting wild polio is effectively 0.
Hardly. Polio has been detected in sewage in the Middle East (multiple countries). So far the only actual cases are in Syria, but that's pure luck (1% chance per disease per person), it could spread very very easily.
I didn't miss it at all. That was exactly what I was replying to!
There is this perception of immunity in the US, but people travel. A lot. If the US slows down polio immunization they will see cases.
(Not sure what Amish has to do with it, but Amish have lots of contact with non-Amish people. Most especially they grow food which is a very common vector.)
While I don't take the attitude that vaccines are to be avoided -- and myself, my wife, and children are vaccinated against all the standard stuff aside from the yearly flu shot -- my grandfather was in a coma for 18 months from Guillain–Barré syndrome which was a reaction to a vaccination.
>my grandfather was in a coma for 18 months from Guillain–Barré syndrome which was a reaction to a vaccination
I'll follow up your useless anecdote with another useless anecdote. I had a close family friend die of the flu. In his 50s.
The chance of developing Guillain–Barré syndrome is under one additional case per million vaccinations. [1] and catching the flu the regular way can contribute to developing Guillain-Barré syndrome and getting infected by influenza itself increases both the risk of death (up to 1 in 10,000) and increases the risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome to a much higher level than the highest level of suspected vaccine involvement (approx. 10 times higher by recent estimates). The WHO reports "Every winter, tens of millions of people get the flu. Most are only ill and out of work for a week, yet the elderly are at a higher risk of death from the illness. We know the worldwide death toll exceeds a few hundred thousand people a year, but even in developed countries the numbers are uncertain, because medical authorities don't usually verify who actually died of influenza and who died of a flu-like illness." [2]
As I said before, all medical interventions go through a "Risk–benefit analysis" and no medical intervention is without risk. But do the benefits of getting the flu shot far outweigh the risks? That's for you to decide, but anecdote does not make data. Your family is far more likely to contract Guillain–Barré syndrome from the flu than the flu vaccine.
Polio-like paralysis can be caused by a number of enteroviruses, and there are cases in the United States every year. This is a large number of cases, but there's no reason to believe it has anything to do with polio or the vaccine (the U.S. does not use the attenuated vaccine that occasionally causes polio-like side effects). Rather, it's cause is likely a as yet unknown enterovirus.
"Most scientists think it's safe" is indeed an appeal to authority. Instead of fear mongering and appeals to reason, let's introduce some real facts into the conversation:
The conclusion that I draw is that the dangers presented by vaccines are far less dangerous than the dangers presented by the diseases they protect against.
The attitude towards vaccine safety isn't "most scientists think it's safe," it's "extensive research has shown that the societal benefits of this vaccine outweigh the potential risks". In this article, it's clear that the infected weren't "endangered by the vaccine." The reason why it mentioned that the children were vaccinated against polio was to show that the outbreak was likely a different virus, not to say that the vaccination in any way caused the infection.
Note that this is not due to polio, and as such any argument that it's caused by the polio vaccine (a flawed argument to begin with, as the live-attenuated vaccine is no longer in routine use in the U.S.) is entirely spurious.
Polio-like paralysis can be caused by a number of viruses, including non-polio enteroviruses, and these do cause disease regularly - not quite at this scale, but also not astonishingly rare.
> The number of people harmed by the vaccine is much lower than the number harmed by an infection.
This this this this this. This is the way vaccines should be presented. But in my experience as a new father vaccines seem to be presented as a magic cure that never does any harm. When's the last time your doctor/nurse discussed the potential side-effects with you?
If the number of folks hurt by vaccines was infinitesimally small, as some would have you believe, we wouldn't have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html)
>When's the last time your doctor/nurse discussed the potential side-effects with you?
On the one hand your right and doctors should be honest about the risks and it should be your choice. On the other hand it's just going to get kids killed when parents hear the doctor tell them about the potential side-effects and decide not to vaccinate.
>The thought that occurred to me was that, innumeracy being so widespread, no one would dare put numbers on that sheet of paper. If "amputation" is listed as a consequence with a probability of 0.0001%, patients will run screaming out of the office, crying, "Not my toe! I don't want to lose my toe!" No amount of patient explanation will suffice to convince them that they ought to diminish the emotional force of their fear by a factor of one million. Each extra zero after the decimal point would only be one more symbol for their eyes to glaze over; it would not diminish the emotional force of the anticipation by an additional factor of ten.
If an evenly distributed percentage opt out, i can see where a vaccine may be less effective. like widening the holes in a net. However, is there a partial vaccination protocol which would strategically place an immunization net around an area of insufficient vaccination which could combat nonvaccination impact and thus prevent or limit spread?
The process you're referring to is "ring vaccination", and is quite commonly used in epidemiology to limit the spread of outbreaks from a known point source. They are however quite resource intensive to implement - you have to do tons of contact tracing to know who belongs in the net.
It would be extremely difficult to do something like that for those avoiding routine childhood vaccinations.
That's not necessarily always true. The halo effect varies depending on the transmissibility of the disease AND the number of people vaccinated. Even small numbers of vaccinations can decrease the spread of an infectious disease.
> Even small numbers of vaccinations can decrease the spread of an infectious disease.
Only of the vaccine is particularly effective in individuals (95%+).
Pertussis seems to be a good counterexample. You really do need the herd immunity to keep it under control since individual immunity seems to be below 70% or so.
In addition, non-vaccinated people tend to be clustered since anti-vaccination is a function of shared social situation (shared belief, religious affiliation, or low socioeconomic status). Consequently, you need MORE people vaccinated to control it, not fewer.
Specifically, the critical % of people needed to be effectively vaccinated is 1 - (1/R0), where R0 is the "Basic Reproductive Number" of the disease. In English, how many people a single infective individual can be expected to infect in an entirely susceptible population.
Any medical intervention goes through something called a "Risk–benefit analysis" where the potential risks are weighed against the potential benefits. We accept a certain level of risk as necessary to achieve certain benefits. Vaccines that are widely used have displayed very high benefits with very low risks, especially on a population level. No medical intervention is without some risk, however low.
The acellular vaccine worked well enough until clumps of people decided that they knew better than several decades of medical research.
Now, we're going to have to switch back to a vaccine that is more individually effective but with more individual side effects because of a bunch of anti-vaccine nitwits.
What if a relative was maimed by NOT getting a vaccine?
One of those two options is far more likely than the other. Far too many children die simply because they were not vaccinated. It's stupid to let people die for a completely preventable reason.
