PA --- meningitis and both students WERE vaccinated!

[serenbat]

both student (thus far) they report were vaccinated (twice) 

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/health&id=8440075

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=8440340

[miriam]

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Edited by miriam - 5/27/12 at 7:36pm

[stik]

No vaccine prevents 100% of all possible cases of the disease it protects against.  They dramatically reduce cases of the disease.  That's a very important public health goal.  It's tragic that these cases weren't prevented.  That doesn't mean the vaccine is useless.  

[serenbat]

 It's tragic that these cases weren't prevented. 

how were the to be prevented?

besides it's being reported that both students have had no contact or any distant contact that they can find other then being at the same school in a major town with thousands of other

That doesn't mean the vaccine is useless.  

this is really funny!

tell that to the majority that are vaced at the school and don't trust the vac now that they took  and are taking meds as a preventive 

[MountainMamaGC]

Bacterial vaccines cause serotype replacements to occur, often more nasty than the ones they were vaccinated for. This happened with the pneumonicoccal vaccine, and its probably happening with the meningicoccal vaccine as well.

http://www.abcmoney.co.uk/news/172007136000.htm

[stik]

Originally Posted by serenbat 

how were the to be prevented?

besides it's being reported that both students have had no contact or any distant contact that they can find other then being at the same school in a major town with thousands of other

this is really funny!

tell that to the majority that are vaced at the school and don't trust the vac now that they took  and are taking meds as a preventive 

I imagine that is precisely what they are being told.  Multiple strains of meningitis have always existed.  When confronted with one that is potentially vaccine resistant, prophylactic medication is often recommended.  I don't see why that's humorous - it's a common public health measure for people who have been exposed to serious diseases.  We don't vaccinate against the plague, for example, but if you wander in to a doctor's office in the US, and tell them that you recently cleared a nest of dead prairie dogs out of your back 40, they'll get you some cipro.  

In this case, you have a university that hasn't had a case of meningitis since 1999, and now they have two unrelated cases and the vast majority of students seem to be completely unaffected.  Most of the student body is healthy enough to wander in to the student health center and wait around until someone can dispense some antibiotics for them.  They haven't had to quarantine college students, which is difficult to do what with how so many of them live in dorms and share bathrooms and dining facilities.  I think some herd immunity is probably at work here.  It's not just that the rest of Lehigh's student body is really scrupulous about their hand-washing, or keeping up with their Emergen-C, or has a box of flower remedies that mom lovingly sent from home that they've been sharing with their dorm mates, or eats a strict paleo diet or whatever.  The meningitis vaccine is required by the Lehigh University Student Health Center, and is about 85% effective against bacterial meningitis (not viral), and now, on a campus with a few thousand kids on it who are at modestly elevated risk (in re. age and lifestyle) for meningitis, you have two cases of bacterial meningitis, the first since 1999, both reported to be recovering well, which suggests that their cases were mild and didn't involve brain damage or loss of limbs.  If that makes you think vaccines aren't working, I invite you to propose a preventative strategy that could achieve better results.  

[serenbat]

 The meningitis vaccine is required by the Lehigh University Student Health Center,

it's not- you can opt out like you can elsewhere

http://www.lehigh.edu/health/PDFs/MeningitisInfoForm.pdf

you make it seem like universities were hot bed of meningitis prior to the vaccine and that is not true

there are those who do oppose the wide spread use of antibiotics (even in this case)

http://www.lehigh.edu/health/PDFs/In%20response%20to%20two%20confirmed%20cases%20of%20students%20contracting%20meningococcal.pdf

[stik]

You can opt out.  But you have to meet the university's requirements for opting out or they can block your registration for your second semester.  They probably have a pretty decent vax rate.  

I said that college students were at modestly elevated risk for meningitis.  I stole the wording from the CDC.  It's not my intention to imply that colleges and universities were hot-beds of meningitis, however, college freshman are at modestly elevated risk for it, and given a population of several thousand people at modestly elevated risk over a 12 year period, two cases is a lovely low rate of infection.

I can't find anything in your link about opposition to the widespread use of antibiotics in this case.  

[miriam]

!

Edited by miriam - 5/27/12 at 7:38pm

[WildKingdom]

Originally Posted by miriam 

Both students were fully vaccinated against meningitis.  How did the vaccine help them?  They got the risk of taking the vaccine AND the risk of having the disease they were vaccinated against.  

The vaccine seems pretty useless to me.  FAIL!

That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. 

[serenbat]

http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/4/455.short

[stik]

Serenbat, that article recommends against excessive prophylactic prescriptions, but doesn't seem opposed to prophylactic antibiotics in the main.  

Miriam, you don't get news articles about the many thousands of exposed students who DIDN'T get meningitis, but imagine that you did here.  According to Lehigh University's admissions website, their entering class (which is the class that has the modestly elevated meningitis link) was around 1700 students this year.  The headline would then read ABOUT 1698 STUDENTS DON'T GET MENINGITIS!!!  And it would be equally accurate - lots of students got the vaccine due to the university's policy, and most of them have been protected from meningitis, which seems to be present in the university community (including, at this moment, all the students who obtained exemptions from the vaccine for various reasons who also DID NOT get meningitis, who are benefiting from herd immunity).  Sounds like a vaccine success to me! 

[Mirzam]

Originally Posted by stik 

Serenbat, that article recommends against excessive prophylactic prescriptions, but doesn't seem opposed to prophylactic antibiotics in the main.  

Miriam, you don't get news articles about the many thousands of exposed students who DIDN'T get meningitis, but imagine that you did here.  According to Lehigh University's admissions website, their entering class (which is the class that has the modestly elevated meningitis link) was around 1700 students this year.  The headline would then read ABOUT 1698 STUDENTS DON'T GET MENINGITIS!!!  And it would be equally accurate - lots of students got the vaccine due to the university's policy, and most of them have been protected from meningitis, which seems to be present in the university community (including, at this moment, all the students who obtained exemptions from the vaccine for various reasons who also DID NOT get meningitis, who are benefiting from herd immunity).  Sounds like a vaccine success to me! 

Just because 1698 students didn't get meningitis does not mean the vaccine is a success. Two vaccinated kids getting meningitis is a vaccine failure. The vaccine does not work, and I am sick of reading the get out: "vaccines don't work 100% of the time, blah, blah, blah". The fact the other students, vaccinated on not, didn't get meningitis has nothing to do with the vaccine or herd immunity, and everything to do with conventional medicine getting it all wrong. Health and sickness comes from within not outside the body. The germ theory has got to go.

Oh and stik, the newspapers don't report 1698 STUDENTS DON'T GET MENINGITIS because it does not engender fear, and fear sells vaccines.

[stik]

I know this idea is really controversial for this forum, but newspapers exist to sell newspapers.  They couldn't care less about selling vaccines.  

They also don't report NO FIRE IN HOTEL ROOM because things that don't happen are boring, and boring doesn't sell newspapers.  

If you don't believe in germ theory, then you've made a very dramatic choice in your understanding of human health.  Personally, I'm down with Pasteur and Semmelweis and the bajillions of lives they've saved.  I'm dying to know, though.  If it wasn't spread by doctors who didn't wash their hands after dissection, where did childbed fever come from?  And why has it stopped coming from wherever that was?  

And, more importantly to this discussion, in your opinion, what has protected the remaining students at Lehigh from meningitis?  How is it miraculously being prevented in the rest of the student body but not in those two students?  First, I need to know, if we're tossing germ theory out the window, what is keeping me from getting meningitis right now?  I was banking on not having been exposed, followed by the vaccine I got because I work with high school students and I don't want to bring things home to my kids, but if germ theory is out, that's all useless.  So, absent germ theory, what determines who gets meningitis?  And then, how do you recommend the rest of the student body protect themselves from it, since you feel germ theory is all wrong?  Two cases of meningitis is only a vaccine failure if you know of something else that would have prevented all the cases.  What have you got?  

[WildKingdom]

Originally Posted by stik 

And, more importantly to this discussion, in your opinion, what has protected the remaining students at Lehigh from meningitis?  How is it miraculously being prevented in the rest of the student body but not in those two students?  First, I need to know, if we're tossing germ theory out the window, what is keeping me from getting meningitis right now?  I was banking on not having been exposed, followed by the vaccine I got because I work with high school students and I don't want to bring things home to my kids, but if germ theory is out, that's all useless.  So, absent germ theory, what determines who gets meningitis?  And then, how do you recommend the rest of the student body protect themselves from it, since you feel germ theory is all wrong?  Two cases of meningitis is only a vaccine failure if you know of something else that would have prevented all the cases.  What have you got?  

Clearly, they were all breastfed as babies, not formula fed as the two unfortunate students who contracted meningitis.  They also must be eating all whole foods and never staying out late partying.  I bet that they also don't have amalgam fillings.

[Mirzam]

stik, I am not going to discuss my thoughts on health and healing and the germ theory in this thread, but feel free to start another one and I will give you my opinions. I will address Semmelweis because interestingly the Semmelweis Reflex, the automatic summary dismissal or rejection out of hand of any new information without thought, inspection or experiment is rife amongst modern conventional medicine and especially vaccine proponents.

Semmelweis did not know why handwashing prevented puerperal fever. The theory of the time was a variation of the "four humours", and "bad blood", thus there was nothing MDs could do about disease. Semmelweis had no theory as to what caused the dead body to harbor pathogenic organisms, but he knew by observation that they did. This lack of a scientific reason led to his observations being summarily rejected, despite his empirical observations and despite the fact his washing protocols worked. Bacteria in dead bodies work to break down or decompose the dead body and produce toxins as a side-effect of this useful work. Only under conditions of oxygen deprivation can the bacteria produce toxins, like tetanus. It was these toxins that caused the childbed fever and not the bacteria themselves which produce the toxins as a side-effect of decomposing the cadaver. The germ theory blames the bacteria when it is a side-effect of the bacteria that causes the sickness. 

Absent of the germ theory, meningitis (inflammation of the meninges) is a healing crisis not a disease in itself and not caused by bacteria of viruses, the bacteria and its actions are controlled by the brain and are present as a sign of the body in healing. Bacteria to disease is like snow to winter.

[serenbat]

in your opinion, what has protected the remaining students at Lehigh from meningitis?  How is it miraculously being prevented in the rest of the student body but not in those two students? 

Quote:

Health and sickness comes from within not outside the body.

-IMO

you can vac all you want- doesn't mean you are protected

if you think vacing yourself against your students (I'm guessing now high school students are a hot bed for disease too - let's push for that mono vac to hurry and come out--yea another one!!) helps you- go for-but where is your proof?

the % that get meningitis (even prior to the vaccines) is sooooooo small and protocol is to give antibiotic regardless if you had the vaccine or not, so how you think vaccinating is the answer eludes me 

[pers]

Originally Posted by miriam 

Both students were fully vaccinated against meningitis.  How did the vaccine help them?  They got the risk of taking the vaccine AND the risk of having the disease they were vaccinated against.  

The vaccine seems pretty useless to me.  FAIL!

The only people I've known personally who died in car accidents were wearing their seatbelts.  How did their seatbelts help them?  They had the risks of a seatbelt (abdominal injury, friction burns, being strangled in a rollover, being trapped in a burning/sinking vehicle... none of those things happened, but the risk is there) and the risk of dying in a car accident anyway.  

Seatbelts seem pretty useless to me.  FAIL!

Originally Posted by Mirzam 

Absent of the germ theory, meningitis (inflammation of the meninges) is a healing crisis not a disease in itself and not caused by bacteria of viruses, the bacteria and its actions are controlled by the brain and are present as a sign of the body in healing. Bacteria to disease is like snow to winter.

So basically, if I understand correctly, if you had a deep cut that needed stitches, and some deranged evil doctor loaded the cut up with tetanus bacteria before stitching it closed over top, you are confident that nothing bad would happen?  Basically, you are saying there is no point in trying to clean out a wound, right, since bacteria is harmless?  

Why (prior to the vaccine at least) did nearly every child get chickenpox at some point?  And why did most of us only get it once?  We get lots of snow here ever winter because every winter we have the conditions of cold air + clouds which cause snow.  What conditions result in chickenpox, if not the virus?  Why do these conditions generally occur once and only once for each person?  If a very young child goes to school right before coming down with chickenpox, why would so many of their classmates suddenly develop those chicken-pox causing conditions at the same time?

[stik]

High school students are quite evidently a hotbed of disease.  I deal with approximately 130 of them every week day.  I'm unlikely to get meningitis from them - we don't have that kind of contact and there are no active cases in my community.  But they are germy.  We who believe in germ theory are quite confident that this is true of all large groups of people.  It's well known that people in their first year of teaching get sick a lot, from the germy students.  It's also well-known that vaccinating teachers cuts down on the number of sick days they use.  Do toxins make you sick?  Yes, they do.  What produces the toxins?  Bacteria and viruses.  Are bacteria and viruses controlled by the brain?  NO, how would that even happen?  How do I get sick?  It's not because my insides are suddenly anerobic.  It's because I've picked up some bacteria which are happily multiplying inside my body, which is already home to bajillions of bacteria, because it's warm and wet in there.  I suppose you're going to call my symptoms a healing crisis.  I'm going to call them a pain in the rear, unless they get really bad, in which case I am going to my doctor for treatment, which I suppose you will say is because the scary newspapers have frightened me into thinking that every sniffle is potentially fatal.  You would be wrong, but you'd like to say it anyway, so I'll just get it out of the way for you here.  Really, it's because symptoms of illness, in addition to being a pain in the rear, can interfere with my ability to carry on with my life, socially and economically, and, in extreme conditions which I personally have not encountered, biologically, and because I can easily get my students and my children sick by sneezing all over them, and some of them get a lot sicker than I do.

To go back to childbed fever, if the bacteria are producing the toxins that are causing the illness, I fail to see why the bacteria are NOT at fault.  No bacteria, no toxins, no disease.  Problem solved.  Analogies are cute, but not scientific.  

Mirzam, if you're not willing to talk about your theories of health and healing here, as relevant to the discussion on the recent meningitis outbreak, I am not going to start another thread for the purposes of examining your reasoning.  I want to know, if, in your opinion, the vaccine can be deemed a failure here because of TWO cases, what do you have to offer that would work better?  And "the belief that meningitis is a healing crisis" isn't going to work for me - you're clearly upset that two students got meningitis, so you don't believe it's a good thing.  Put your cards on the table - why did these two students get meningitis, and not everyone else?  How should it have been prevented in both these two individuals and the rest of the Lehigh University student body?  

Serenbat, the protocol is to vaccinate everyone, and then give antibiotics in the case of known exposure.  The vaccination is intended to help cut down on cases caused by unknown exposure, like you get when  - to present one possible scenario - two drunk students who are home on break make out at a party, and then go back to their respective institutions of higher learning thousands of miles apart and don't keep in touch to say things like "UR so hot - BTW, I have meningitis."  Or, to present a scenario that's less provocative, a student who is in NYC interviewing for a fabulous summer internship thoughtfully offers a handkerchief to the interviewer, who has just sneezed several times, and then takes it back and shoves it in his pocket, and then excuses himself to the restroom to adjust a contact lens, never knowing that the interviewer is an asymptomatic carrier and the hankie (and the student's hands) are now covered with meningitis bacteria.  Public health often involves the application of several strategies.  It doesn't mean that none of those strategies actually work.

[Super~Single~Mama]

Originally Posted by stik 

Serenbat, the protocol is to vaccinate everyone, and then give antibiotics in the case of known exposure.  The vaccination is intended to help cut down on cases caused by unknown exposure, like you get when  - to present one possible scenario - two drunk students who are home on break make out at a party, and then go back to their respective institutions of higher learning thousands of miles apart and don't keep in touch to say things like "UR so hot - BTW, I have meningitis."  Or, to present a scenario that's less provocative, a student who is in NYC interviewing for a fabulous summer internship thoughtfully offers a handkerchief to the interviewer, who has just sneezed several times, and then takes it back and shoves it in his pocket, and then excuses himself to the restroom to adjust a contact lens, never knowing that the interviewer is an asymptomatic carrier and the hankie (and the student's hands) are now covered with meningitis bacteria.  Public health often involves the application of several strategies.  It doesn't mean that none of those strategies actually work.

It should be noted that Meningitis is one of the few vax preventable diseases that this is true for. Most of the time, antibiotics are not given as a precaution. So why are they given as a precaution when dealing with meningitis? Because meningitis has HUGE consequences in severe cases.  I know someone who I went to college with who lost all FOUR limbs to meningitis - I certainly don't want that to happen to me, and if I knew of an exposure, I would beg for the meds. If my child were exposed, I would beg for the meds - I would do almost anything to prevent that type of illness from striking my family.