The Religious Right's Anti-Vaccine Hysteria Is Reviving Dead Diseases In America

[zappaman]

Remember measles? That old-timey disease we officially eliminated in the United States 13 years ago? Thanks to the wonder of inoculation, measles should be entirely nonexistent in this country, but yesterday the Center for Disease Control reported 159 cases from January through August of this year. This puts our country on track for the worst measles year since 1996, when there were 500 reported cases—which is disturbing, especially because doctors and nurses aren't really trained to look out for measles anymore, because of the whole "elimination" thing.

This might be a good moment to remind everyone what measles does to humans. In adults, it's a respiratory infection that leads to a four-day fever and a stain-like reddish rash that will keep you home from work watching Netflix and checking your temperature. It’s not usually fatal, but it’s pretty hard on kids. Even with the best care, about three of every 1,000 kids who get measles will die from it.

Studying the patterns and causes of health and disease is one of those jobs where you’re forced to admire the perfection of fatal diseases, which is why most epidemiologists and infectious-disease doctors remind me of Ash in Alien. Diseases grow and change in ways that doctors simply can’t predict, and looking closely at these "perfect organisms" can quickly turn into admiring their destructive power. Look, my friend's dad was an infectious-disease doctor, and he really freaked us out with old medical books.

More at link:

http://www.vice.com/read/the-religious-rights-anti-vaccine-hysteria-is-reviving-dead-diseases?utm_source=vicefbus

[FSogol]

1. K & R. n/t

[el_bryanto]

2. Is that a religious right issue?

I thought that was something that some Christians and some Secular folk were promoting - never saw it as specifically connected to the Religious Right.

Bryant

[zappaman]

3. read the article

"What’s unique about this year's outbreak is that the CDC has finally admitted the spread of this “eliminated” disease is based on religious communities’ philosophical aversion to vaccines and reliance on divine healing through the Word of God. According to the report, 91 percent of the reported cases were in people who were unvaccinated, or didn’t know their vaccination status, and “of those who were unvaccinated, 79 percent had philosophical objections to vaccination.”

These cases began in religious communities, but eventually spread out of them and infected infants who couldn't legally be vaccinated yet. This August, epidemiologists in Texas began investigating the Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas. The megachurch, which believes in faith healing, had become an open breeding ground for measles after a member of the congregation returned from Indonesia and infected 21 people in and around Newark. It was widely reported that Terri Pearsons, the church’s senior pastor, had encouraged her followers to avoid vaccinations at all costs. The church has defensively denied this claim, which contradicts Pearsons’s continued reservations about vaccines."

[gopiscrap]

4. Bunch of fucking ignorant assholes

another reason they should be marginalized

[ChairmanAgnostic]

5. I'd agree, but for the danger they create for others.

They are a true menace.

[Bunnahabhain]

6. There is no excuse for this

but I find resistance to immunizations and refusal to understand the concept of "herd immunity" cuts across religious and party lines. The autism is caused by vaccine crowd seem to have a heavy progressive demographic.