Today's Managing Health Care Costs Number is 20,000 |
There are a lot of statistics in the campaign of defrocked physician Andrew Wakefield to convince unwary parents not to vaccinate their children against measles. From the CDC:
- As many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
- About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability.
- For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.
- 4-11 out of every 100,000 who get measles are at risk for Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis, a fatal disease that shows up 7-10 years after recovery from measles
Before measles vaccine was licensed in 1962, 450-500 Americans died of the disease each year. 48,000 were hospitalized and 4000 had encephalitis (brain swelling). Measles was eradicated from the US in 2000 - and most physicians of my generation (I graduated from med school in 1984) have never seen a case of measles. But the danger of measles remains.
Minnesota just announced the end of its most recent measles epidemic, which centered on unvaccinated Somali refugees. Measles is reason enough for parents to take their children in for the MMR vaccination, which protects against measles, rubella (German Measles), and mumps.
But I have another reason to talk about the importance of the MMR vaccination -and how I am nauseated by public figures from Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced former doctor who made up statistics for a since-retracted paper associating MMR vaccine with autism, Robert Kennedy, Jr, who continues to wave the flag for vaccine deniers long after this vaccine has proven safe, and Donald Trump, who tweeted"I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future" in 2014
But I don't want to focus on statistics. I don't even want to focus on Measles. I want to focus on Rubella, also known as German Measles, an unrelated virus which is prevented by the same vaccination that protects children against the measles, the MMR vaccine.
Before the rubella vaccination program started in 1969, rubella was a common and widespread infection in the United States. During the last major rubella epidemic in the United States from 1964 to 1965, an estimated 12.5 million people got rubella, 11,000 pregnant women lost their babies, 2,100 newborns died, and 20,000 babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). Source
The Washington Post heralded the elimination of rubella transmission in the US (2005) with this description:
Mild and often entirely unnoticed in children, rubella infection can be devastating to developing fetuses. A woman infected with the virus in the first three months of pregnancy will probably suffer miscarriage, or deliver a stillborn or permanently disabled child… The last great U.S. epidemic of rubella -- 40 years ago, before there was a vaccine against the disease …so swelled the number of congenitally deaf Americans that Gallaudet University, the District's educational institution for the hearing-impaired, eventually acquired a second campus to accommodate them.
Those who attended Gallaudet University who suffered congenital deafness from Rubella while they were in the womb were the lucky ones.
During college, I served as an assistant at a suburban Boston residential facility for adolescents whose moms had rubella during pregnancy. At ages 13-16, these children were blind, deaf, and had severe cognitive impairment. They were unable to speak or read; most required antipsychotic agents to get through the day; and many of them had painful head-banging episodes. None were able to stay with their families for more than a few hours at a time, and all were destined to live their lives in institutions.
I often think about these kids- now middle aged if they are still alive - when I hear people railing against vaccines. Maybe some of the vaccine deniers mean well - maybe they even believe the junk science underlying vaccine denial.
Vaccines represent one of the largest advances in public health of the last 60 years - and childhood vaccinations like the MMR continue to be among the few medical interventions that genuinely save money, as well as improve health and save lives.
20,000 babies had Congenital Rubella Syndrome in the last Rubella pandemic. We can't let this happen.
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