Sunday, September 21, 2008

Increase in Measles Cases

The CDC has issued a press release on an increase in the number of measles cases in the U.S. this year, with 131 cases reported so far. Of those measles patients, 95 were eligible for vaccination but 63 of them were not vaccinated because of their--or most likely their parents'--belief that vaccines are "dangerous."
I'm not sure how much evidence there need to be to convince parents that the MMR vaccine, and/or the preservative in it, do not cause autism. Obviously, piles of evidence accrued from gigantic longitudinal studies of thousands of children over many years are not enough. (see here, here, here, here, and here, for starters.) Will an epidemic of preventable, deadly infections be the only thing that will change some people's minds?
If people want to put themselves in harm's way because of their willingness to believe a bunch of pseudoscientific wackaloons, that's their problem. It's a terrible shame that they're putting their kids at risk too.

2 comments:

Patrick said...

why are you hating on the fearmongers?!

Susan Johnson said...

if the fearmongers had a scientific basis for their fearmongering then more power to them. nonsensical fearmongering is another story.