question about history of measles

[Mebsy]

I was hoping someone could help me out. I'm having a "friendly discussion" with a friend of mine regarding vaccines and he is picking at every little thing I say trying to prove that I'm an idiot for choosing not to vaccinate. One of my arguments was that many of these diseases, like pertussis, were steadily declining well before the vaccine. He came back to me with "What about measles? If you look at the census reports you will see that it was pretty much the same until the vaccine arrived, when it dropped dramatically." My question is, would the census be a completely accurate account of confirmed cases of disease? Is there anything else that might say differently? Also, I know for a fact that the measles death rate dropped dramatically prior to the vaccine, so why would the number of cases remain the same while the death rate takes such a plummet?

[caned & able]

From the CDC's own publication in 1967:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...027%2D0069.pdf

The clinical disease is a characteristic syndrome of notable constancy and only moderate severity. Complications are infrequent, and, with adequate medical care, fatality is rare.

and of course, any picture is worth a thousand words...

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi.../Suppl_2/1.pdf

The deaths dropped off because of better nutrition and sanitation, but the incidence remained constant.

[Deborah]

What isn't understood is exactly how horrendous the living conditions were in big cities in the early modern era. Imagine, for example, how much spoiled food was consumed in big cities before most people had refrigeration. Imagine, for another example, how dirty people were when running water was largely unavailable, all clothing had to be hand-laundered and many people lived crowded together in tenements with poor (to put it mildly) arrangements for disposal of human waste. Think of how diseases spread when people lived 20 or 30 to a room.

The high death rate from measles had very little to do with the viciousness of the disease and a lot to do with the sheer difficulty of surviving under horrendous living conditions. Most of the deaths were in infants and small children, of course. But it wasn't due to a deficiency of vaccines, it was due to deficient cleanliness, lack of fresh air, extreme malnutrition, an incredible level of overcrowding...

I'll see if I can find an older thread which discusses measles, there are some good ones.

[Deborah]

This one doesn't really help with the history of the disease, but it was very entertaining and did bring out some of the problems with trying to eradicate childhood illnesses with vaccines: http://mothering.com/discussions/sho....php?t=1159548

[Pirogi]

Originally Posted by caned & able

From the CDC's own publication in 1967:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...027%2D0069.pdf



and of course, any picture is worth a thousand words...

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi.../Suppl_2/1.pdf

The deaths dropped off because of better nutrition and sanitation, but the incidence remained constant.

Thank you for these links!!

I thought this was interesting from the first (bolding mine):

Examining the evidence from the point of view of immunity, it is evident that when the level of immunity was higher than 55%, epidemics did not develop. This is an estimate of the threshold of herd immunity providing protection to the city against a measles epidemic.

So in this definition of herd immunity, prevention of an epidemic indicated success, not prevention of transmission.

Also, the tone of both of these articles gives a lot of insight into how we got to where we are. These were intelligent people who were discovering new things. They were hopeful, maybe a tad vain, but mostly their tone was that they truly, truly believed they were going to change the world for the better. I wonder if these original doctors could see now the practical physical, social, and economic consequences of multiple compulsory vaccinations in the US, if they would still believe it was the best option. Now we have the second or third generation of doctors who don't have the same intimate understanding of disease as the vaccine pioneers, who have grown up all the way through medical school with the mainstream vaccine ideology, and I feel this limits their ability to look honestly at our current social program.