When Measles Strikes

The media has been full of reports on the Texas mega-church with a measles outbreak because their pastor preaches against vaccination. The irony and coincidence of the situation has caused national news outlets, blogs and others to comment.

The Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark is a division TV evangelist Kenneth Copeland, who advocates faith healing and has talked of his belief in the vaccine-autism link. His daughter Terri Pearsons is the senior pastor at Eagle Mountain. The measles outbreak at the church has infected 21 people ranging in age from 4-months to 44-years old. The majority of the infected people were never vaccinated. Health officials expect the outbreak to grow.

A person who contracted measles in Indonesia visited the church and caused the outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) notes that measles is spread by coughing, sneezing and close personal contact. It is recommended that children get two doses of the MMR vaccine, which covers measles, mumps and rubella.

Measles is a highly contagious disease, 90% of people who aren’t vaccinated or immune to it will get sick if exposed to the disease. Symptoms of measles include a fever, cough and rash. The outbreak has led the church to hold vaccination clinics and encourage those who won’t be vaccinated to self-quarantine.

Health officials across the country have taken note and urge precaution. “We don’t take chances with our kids when we have them in a car, we should not take chances with our kids when they’re out in the world,” Dr. Ken Haller of Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in Missouri states. “Kids need to be vaccinated. I feel so sorry for these people who got measles down in Texas and I hope none of them end up dying as a result of it.”

“It is really important, as parents, if you have fears for your kid’s safety, for those fears to be rational; the fear of the diseases we’re trying to prevent and not the best means of preventing it,” Dr. Haller adds.

Vaccine Watch encourages everyone to get vaccinated. Diseases like measles are serious and can lead to death – but vaccination is a simple and safe preventative action. Ask your doctor if you have questions about vaccines, don’t depend on the wisdom of the non-medical community or the Internet. 

Jenny McCarthy and The View

ABC News made headlines this week when they announced that anti-vaccine advocate Jenny McCarthy is joining the popular daytime show the View as a host in September. McCarthy has been linked to the anti-vaccine movement for over ten years, claiming a vaccine caused her son’s autism. 

McCarthy has been so outspoken on the topic that a website tracking the number of illnesses and deaths caused by the anti-vaccine movement has the domain name www.jennymccarthybodycount.com. With 1,170 preventable deaths between June 3, 2007 and June 22, 2013 and over 118,000 preventable illnesses, vaccine advocates are concerned about McCarthy’s new platform to spread her views.

The View caters to mothers and the credibility of host Barbara Walters and others influences the decisions many people make.  Over twenty studies have proven that there is no link between vaccines and autism. On the contrary, vaccines are the most effective instruments of public health. However, talented speakers like McCarthy can spread their scientific illiteracy through media quickly; McCarthy already has a book and will now regularly have television as another venue.

Michael Specter of The New Yorker states, “It is understandable that people would suspect vaccines are a cause of autism; parents often first notice developmental problems when their children are about eighteen months old, the same time they often receive several vaccinations. Causation and correlation are often confused, however as many studies have demonstrated. (Assuming that events that happen at the same time are connected can lead to serious misconceptions: over the last decade, for example the rise in the sales of organic food in the United States has mirrored the growth in autism rates almost exactly. No sane person would suggest that those facts are related.)”

“By preaching her (McCarthy’s) message of scientific illiteracy from one end of this country to the other, she has helped make it possible for people to turn away from rational thought. And that is deadly,” Specter concludes.

The anti-vaccine movement has been blamed for recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough. Communities across the world are working to increase education and vaccination rates. Wendy Sue Swanson is a pediatrician in Seattle and believes it will take decades to recover from the anti-vaccine movement. “In the medical community, we’ll work to undo myths around vaccine safety for the rest of our lives, in part because of Ms. McCarthy,” she states.

Vaccine Watch encourages parents to make their decisions about vaccines with the help of pediatricians and sound science, not Hollywood.

Get Vaccinated: It's the Law

A growing number of parents in Oregon aren’t vaccinating their children against deadly diseases because they believe vaccines can have irreversible adverse health effects. Oregon leads the national exemption list, with 5.8 percent of kindergartners (or more than 2,600 children) being exempt from vaccines last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in April that eight young children who were taken into state custody last year could be vaccinated. Their parents have claimed that religious beliefs exempt the children from vaccination. The Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) has argued and carried the point that because the state has custody of the children, the state can also make medical decisions for the children.

DHS had checked with a doctor to make sure the children didn’t have allergies or other medical conditions. The doctor recommended immunizations, and DHS turned to a judge for permission when the parents refused. The Oregon appeals court noted that North Carolina and Georgia courts have also denied parents without custody of their kids a say in immunizations. Conversely, Arizona ruled in favor of a mother who didn’t want her child vaccinated.

Oregon continues to represent ground zero in the childhood vaccine debate with the state Senate voting in May on a bill that would require parents to be educated about vaccines before they can exempt their children from them. The number of unvaccinated kindergarteners increased to 6.4% this year and officials fear a public safety disaster similar to the recent measles outbreak in Wales.

The bill stipulates that parents enrolling unvaccinated children in school would have to prove they consulted a physician for information, or show a certificate verifying they watched an online educational video about the risks and benefits of immunization. In 2011, Washington passed similar legislation. Although Oregon has debated both sides of this bill, it was passed by the Oregon Senate on Thursday, June 6th and is now in the Oregon House.

“The more people you have that are unvaccinated, the more likely you are to have those diseases spread,” Dr. Jay Rosenbloom, a spokesman for Oregonians for Healthy Children stated. “The percentage of Oregon parents signing personal-beliefs vaccine exemptions has been rising steadily since 2001, but declining a vaccination doesn’t just affect the individual.”

The vaccine debate will continue, both with parents of young children and in other areas. Vaccine Watch urges those concerned about vaccines to speak with a doctor about the risks and benefits before making a decision.

Vaccine Confidence Project

Dr. Heidi Larson

The internet and its rapid spread of information can magnify and expand a vaccine scare in a short amount of time. Now, the internet can also combat misinformation. Dr. Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a team of colleagues adapted the HealthMap automated data collection system to track rumors and online sentiments about vaccines on the internet. HealthMap was originally developed to track disease outbreaks.

“The internet has sped up the global spread of unchecked rumors and misinformation about vaccines and can seriously undermine public confidence, leading to low rates of vaccine uptake and even disease outbreaks,” Dr. Larson said.

The surveillance system covers 144 countries and looks at online articles, blogs and reports about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. By identifying the first signs of the negative reports, Dr. Larson and her colleagues hope to take preventative action on anti-vaccine sentiment before it becomes a larger problem like the recent measles outbreak in Wales or the polio outbreak in Nigeria that re-introduced polio to 20 countries that had been free of the disease.

The original data collection for the Vaccine Confidence Project took place from May 1, 2011 to April 30, 2012 and identified 10,380 online mentions of human vaccines. 3,209 of these reports, or 31%, were negative and included fears about adverse events and vaccine distrust. The negative reports focused on vaccination programs, disease outbreaks, attitudes about vaccine believes, awareness and perception and vaccine safety.

“Bad news stories damage vaccination programs as much as biological hazards, and these stories evolve over minutes or hours, needing immediate action,” said University of Toronto public health specialists Natasha Crowcroft and Kwame McKenzie. “By the time a detailed specific analysis of vaccine safety issue is completed, the story is no longer newsworthy.”

Ideally, the Vaccine Confidence Project will identify early signs of vaccine misinformation in real time and enable public health officials to act immediately to dispel unfounded fears. “Public health systems need to move beyond passive responses to vaccine safety events towards active preparedness,” Crowcroft and McKenzie continue. “It is important for researchers to discover how to make communities resilient to bad science and interest-driven scare stories.”

By continuing to build public belief and trust in vaccines, health officials can avoid unfortunate situations like the recent measles outbreak and Nigeria’s polio epidemic. HealthMap and other tools available will be beneficial in containing vaccine fear tactics and enhancing education systems.