Measles Outbreak Exposes "Anti-Vax" Lunacy

When I was a kid I got the measles. It seemed like a natural part of life; just about everybody got the "childhood diseases" like measles and chicken pox. It was considered unavoidable. My mother actually told me years later that she intentionally exposed me to chicken pox when I was a toddler under the reasoning that everybody got these viruses sooner or later, and it was better to get it over with as a child than catch them when you were older when they might affect you worse. I never considered something like measles serious; as far as I knew it was discomforting for about a week and that was it.

Little did I know the truth. The World Health Organization reports that "before widespread vaccination began in 1980, 2.6 million people a year died from measles. About 400 people a day still do." That's about 145,000 a year. Dead from measles. I had no idea.

The last known native case of measles, according to the US Center for Disease Control, happened in the year 2000. Other cases since were always of unvaccinated foreigners. Humans are the only host for the measles virus and the vaccine is 100% effective. There was genuine hope of eradicating this sometimes lethal disease that is known as probably the most contagious of all viruses, so communicable that a single sneeze can leave pathogens in the air that will linger for up to two hours.

We now have a resurgence of measles in America that started at Disneyland in Anaheim and has, as of yesterday, spread to 84 victims in 14 states. This was completely preventable and is completely outrageous. It can only be happening because "anti-vax" parents are purposely keeping their kids from getting protected from a potentially lethal disease. There is absolutely no evidence to substantiate any of the imagined claims of a link between vaccinations and autism or any other negative health condition. As PhD microbiologist Alex Berezow wrote today, such parents have "blood on their hands" and should "go to jail." I agree. Reckless endangerment is reckless endangerment, whether it entails leaving a kid in a hot car or leaving them exposed to germs that want to kill them. As Berezow says, "It is time to end this insanity."