I know I just wrote about vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise once again, but even in the past couple of days there’s more news:

1) Houston is seeing the first case of measles in six years. The victim? An 11-month-old baby. Let’s hope she has a full and swift recovery, and no one else falls ill.

2) In that post linked above I talked about a school in Virginia that had to close down due to a big pertussis outbreak. Well, in Canada, they’re telling kids who are unvaccinated they can’t come to school; at least, not until they can show their inoculations are up-to-date. I have mixed feelings about forcing kids to get vaccinated, but in the end we simply cannot have schools be breeding grounds for diseases which are trivially easy to prevent. I read about this story on Fark, and the comments there are interesting, to say the least.

3) Seth Mnookin, who wrote "The Panic Virus" an exposé of the antivax movement, has posted his thoughts on these recent news stories. As usual, I find his comments to be well-reasoned and thoughtful.

Short and sweet:

Why is it that when…

a) 30 people in Virginia have been diagnosed with pertussis (whooping cough) — enough to cause classes to be canceled at a local school — and

b) 14 cases have popped up in Minnesota — cases which can apparently be traced almost directly to the dangerous antivax movement —

… does CBS allow a ridiculous antivax screed by reporter Sharyl Attkisson ever to see the light of day?

Get vaccination FACTS at Immunize for Good.

Tip o’ the syringe to balister. Pertussis image from Microbiology2009.

As I write this, I just got back from hearing author Seth Mnookin give a talk here in Boulder about his book, The Panic Virus (the talk was sponsored by my friends at the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition — I love those folks). It’s an excellent book about the rise and power of the antivax movement. I recommend reading it. That is, if your stomach doesn’t get upset over the events it describes. Mine did.

The talk was quite good, with him going over the basics of the people who fight against vaccinations. The most interesting part was during the Q&A, when a woman sitting right behind me starting soapboxing about how vaccines weren’t tested enough, and there weren’t enough studies showing their safety, and so on. It was clear after she said just a few words that she was from some antivax organization, and I found out afterward she was from Safeminds — a group that tried to get really awful ads placed in movie theaters but which was fought tooth and nail by Skepchicks.

The woman’s tactics were pretty simple: sow doubt, and use bad logic to do so. First she misrepresented what Seth wrote in his book (saying he was one-sided, always supporting vaccines, when in fact he has a lot to say about the failings of how they are tested and discussed by some doctors to parents). Then she tried to imply a false dichotomy: if they aren’t tested well, they cannot be safe, and we shouldn’t use them. That’s obviously wrong, and also ignores the vast amount of good vaccines do. When was the last time you heard of someone contracting smallpox? Oh right: 1977.

Thanks, vaccines!

Anyway, about Seth’s book, my friend and fellow science advocate Dr. Rachael Dunlop pointed me toward the new Australian edition of the book, which has a new preface as well. I’m happy to see that Mnookin directly takes on the situation in Australia, documenting the behavior of antivaxxer Meryl Dorey and relaying the story of the McCafferys, who lost their four week old daughter Dana due to pertussis and low vaccination rates. You can read the preface at that link above.

Again, I do recommend this book. Dorey’s organization may be on its way out, but the antivaxxers are still out there –obviously, as evidenced by the woman from Safeminds at the talk — and still spreading mistrust and fear. The Panic Virus will give you a lot of useful information about how this came to be, and what we can do about it.

[P.S. Before the usual brigade of antivaxxers swarm the comments below and accuse me of being a Big Pharma shill, please read this essay by skeptic Rebecca Watson about the pharmaceutical industry. I agree with her.]

Jessica Hagy has a terrific website called Indexed, where she uses simple, hand-drawn charts and Venn diagrams to make some pithy point in a funny way. She’s tackles all kinds of topics, and recently, to my heart’s delight, made a very simple point about vaccines:

Yup. Hard to be any more succinct than that.

[Speaking of succinct points, check out a strip from last week's Frazz webcomic, sent to me by my brother Sid.]

Two interesting court cases relevant to medical reality came up recently.

1) Yahoo news is reporting that a judge has thrown out a case where lawyers wanted to use religious and alt-med exemptions as an excuse to not get health care. People were claiming that they had faith that God would heal them in times of sickness, and that forcing them to get health care was an attack on that belief. There are a lot of things wrong with this — for example, they weren’t being forced to actually get health care, just insurance — and to be frank, this sort of thinking constitutes a major health risk to the population. It also smells very much like a fishing expedition on the part of people against universal health care, using religion as a "get out of critical responses free" card.

I’ve said this before: as an American I am not thrilled with the government telling me what I have to do or not do, but there are times when the greater good must be considered… and considered very carefully. Slippery slopes are treacherous. To some people "the greater good" is a phrase used to justify way too much, but it also is part of the Preamble to the Constitution. It’s why we have government in the first place. And when it comes to public health threats coupled with a large number of unskeptical people, it definitely comes into play.

Tip o’ the tort to Fark.

2) The Supreme Court has ruled that a family claiming their daughter was injured by vaccinations cannot sue the manufacturer. It’s a bit of a complicated situation, but Orac has a breakdown. There’s a lot of rhetoric flying around, and while Orac’s discussion is a bit lengthy it’s well worth your time. The bottom line is that there is so much antivax nonsense out there that companies making vaccines are at big financial risk to produce them due to potentially costly litigation. This represents a huge health risk — vaccines save millions of lives — so several years ago a special court system was set up to handle vaccine damage claims. This new ruling protects that system.

To me, this whole compromise of a special court is the best that we can hope for given how strong the antivax movement is, and how vast a public health threat it is. I’d rather we didn’t have to have a special court to handle these lawsuits, but the reality is that we need it if we are to protect people from diseases which would resurge if the vaccines were to stop being made and distributed.

It breaks my heart that so many parents are out there looking for answers for their children’s illnesses, but we cannot abandon all reason and all science because of it — in fact, we must stick with the evidence and science-based medicine all the more strongly. If we don’t then billions of dollars will be wasted, and, far worse, a specter will rise once again of many more deaths due to preventable diseases.

Two bits of anti-medicine news, both from the United States northwest, and both dealing with difficult situations:

1) In Oregon, lawmakers are making it harder for people to use religion as an excuse to avoid medical treatment. The Followers of Christ, a fringe Christian group, advocates faith healing and not standard medicine, and as a result several children in that group have died in recent years. Because of this, a bill has been introduced into the Oregon state legislature to remove religious belief as a defense against homicide. If convicted, a parent whose child has died because they used faith healing instead of real medicine will be charged with homicide and have a mandatory sentence.

Stories like this always leave me conflicted. As a parent myself I always want the best possible medical treatment for my child, and I don’t want other groups interfering with that decision. However, the State has a right to protect the best interests of that child in case the parent cannot. Decades worth of evidence has shown that faith healing does not work, and in many cases the children in the Followers of Christ church had easily treatable illnesses and needn’t have died.

In the end, the right thing to do is save that sick child. If the parent cannot, then the greater society has the responsibility to do that.

This opens a can of worms, I know. (more…)

The long-running comic strip Doonesbury does a lot of political humor of course, so it was no surprise he went after J. McCarthy today. After all, McCarthy used an environment of fear to terrify people into behaving contrary to their own best interests, ramping up an imaginary problem into a national concern, and putting thousands upon thousands of lives at risk of being destroyed.

No no no. Not Joseph. Jenny.

Tip o’ the syringe to the eight gazillion people who sent me that link, including my brother Sid.