Someone has to yell, 'The emperor has no clothes!" and I think nothing screams that louder than cold hard statistics. For years now the anti-vax movement has made all kinds of debunked claims about the dangers of vaccines. Everyone of them has been proven statistically inaccurate or flat out wrong. However many well meaning folks have been lead astray by these claims.
When I was a young child, the measles vaccine was introduced. Over my time since then, I've never known a person to come down with the disease. It had become so rare in the U.S. that many began to say it was irradicated.
Then along came the anti-vax claims. Many of those terrified parents of young children who thought they were doing the right thing for their children by refusing the vaccine. Due to that, there's a fair amount of people who no longer have immunity to measles. That leads us to where we are today. Fear is a powerful motivator. When I was young it was the fear of their child catching measles that drove parents to get their kids vaccinated. Today the debunked buy loudly shouted fears of problems caused by vaccines has, in some areas, driven fear in the other direction.
Measles (also called rubeola) is caused by the morbillivirus virus and is highly infectious. It spreads through the air when an infected person sneezes, coughs, or even speaks. Statistics say that if a person is not immune, 90% of those exposed to the virus will contract it. That's 9 out of 10. The odds are not in an unvaccinated person's favor.
The benefit of vaccines is that even if a person should contract a disease by some strange twist of fate, the odds of passing it to others is greatly reduced due to herd immunity. However, in an area where few people are immune, the disease spreads like wildfire. Measles is especially an example of this. The other unfortunate thing is that symptoms don't start to show immediately. It takes somewhere between one to three weeks before symptoms develop and that entire time, the person is spreading the virus to everyone they come in contact with. 90% of the people they come in contact with will then develop the disease... if they are unvaccinated.
Measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and even death. Those are grave consequences. Hopefully this puts things into perspective. From a dental perspective, measles can also affect the mouth. The oral symptoms are an early diagnostic tool as they normally present before the characteristic skin rash appears on other parts of the body. Due to these early oral lesions, dentists can become key in helping fight the spread of the disease by identifying it and advising the patient to see a physician and avoid contact with others.
The CDC keeps statistics on these types of things and they update them regularly. The current "Measles Cases and Outbreaks" page on the CDC website is updated every Wednesday and contains some fascinating information. Since 2015 more and more infections, cases and outbreaks have been reported in the U.S. The outbreaks this year are large. Since 2010, the largest number of cases was in 2019. In that year there were 1,274 cases reported. Through July 1 of 2025 there are 1,267 confirmed cases. That means we've already surpassed the largest reported number of cases in the last 10 years... and the year is only a bit more than half over.
Simply put, the numbers don't lie. If you'd like more info, I highly recommend visiting the CDC Measles Cases and Outbreaks page. It not only gives you numbers, but there also links to resources you can use.
No comments:
Post a Comment