Summary
A measles outbreak in rural West Texas has surged to 49 confirmed cases, mostly among unvaccinated school-age children, with officials suspecting hundreds more unreported infections.
The outbreak is centered in Gaines County, home to a large Mennonite population with low vaccination rates. Despite CDC support, Texas has not requested federal intervention.
The outbreak has now spread to Lubbock, raising wider public health concerns.
Experts warn it could persist for months without increased vaccination efforts, but skepticism toward vaccines remains a significant barrier.
They will continue to die and let their children die to spite the rest of us.
I hope some day we can invent some sort of treatment that could prevent kids from ever getting this disease.
My greatest fear is that we will never find the cure for being an idiot. I know for some people that the disease is fatal.
RFK will recommend drinking water, take a vitamin and suck it up. Nothing to see here, move along. I feel sorry for the children who are led by their dumb fucked up parents.
Next up, Polio.
And it will never end til everyone who can contract measles, contracts it. TX does not care, and neither does RFK Jr. Shrug.
I would totally gloat on the FO, but it sucks for the non-idiotic Texans and those that can’t get vaxed. :-/
Hahaha, that is really funny. People in red states dieing because of a disease we wiped out almost entirely. I really gotta open a “child coffin” plant in Texas.
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
Roald Dahl, pleading with people to vaccinate their children against measles.
The part that sucks in all of this: the children who died didn’t choose to not get the vaccine. Their parents did.
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Good thing everyone I know is vaccinated.
Vaccines aren’t anywhere near 100% effective, they rely on herd immunity which means enough people have to have the vaccine so the disease can’t get a foothold and goes extinct.
Some vaccines need to be 100% reliable like the tetanus one. The bacteria live in soil everywhere. Herd immunity isn’t going to do a thing there.
Correct, but sometimes you have to distill information into one sentence for it to sink into people’s heads. It’s baffling to me that everyone didn’t learn the basic science of vaccines during the pandemic, but here we still are.
The true and actionable message is that “fuck you, I got mine” is generally a useless and dangerous attitude towards almost every vaccine.
Btw is this antivax thing mostly American and Pakistani? I don’t recall seeing news about this from other countries.
I was wrong
No, absolutely not. May I ask what data you used to form your conclusion?
Personal anecdotal evidence from everyday news.
How bad are the measles, really? Asking because I was born in the 1st fucking world and never met anyone under a 100 that met someone with it.
“In the US, 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized. Five percent develop pneumonia, and up to 3 in 1,000 die of the infection. In rare cases, measles can cause a fatal disease of the central nervous system called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which develops years after infection. Measles also wipes out immune responses to other infections (a phenomenon known as immune amnesia), making people vulnerable to other infectious diseases.”
We think of measles as a minor viral infection of kids that causes fever, rash, and a runny nose, and goes away without major complications. Unfortunately, that is not always so. Nervous system disease is a particular problem. SSPE occurs as a late, fatal measles complication in one out of 1,367 cases of measles in children younger than 5. One out of 1,000 children with measles gets an infection of the brain (encephalitis) early in the course of measles. About 15% of children with measles encephalitis die. Measles encephalitis led to the death of the writer Roald Dahl’s daughter Olivia.
Children’s brains can also develop an allergic reaction to the measles virus several weeks after infection. This is called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). Children seem to recover, then get fever, confusion, headaches, and neck stiffness. Like SSPE and measles encephalitis, ADEM occurs in about one out of 1,000 cases of measles. It is fatal in 10% to 20% of patients. Survivors of measles encephalitis and ADEM often have epilepsy, brain damage, or developmental delay.
Measles has other serious complications. During pregnancy, it causes miscarriages. Measles can infect the cornea, and was once a common cause of blindness. Ear infections and hearing loss are frequent. Measles virus also infects the lungs, causing pneumonia in 3% to 4% of cases. Measles weakens the immune system for at least two months. Sometimes patients die of other infections immediately after they recover from measles. In a measles epidemic that killed more than 3,000 soldiers in the US Army in 1917–18, bacterial pneumonia was the major cause of death.
Measles: The forgotten killer - John Ross, MD, FIDSA, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing
Well, that sounds pretty bad, but how contagious is it?
Extremely, iirc. According to wikipedia:
It is extremely contagious: nine out of ten people who are not immune and share living space with an infected person will be infected.[5] Furthermore, measles’s reproductive number estimates vary beyond the frequently cited range of 12 to 18,[17] with a 2017 review giving a range of 3.7 to 203.3
For context the reproductive number (average number of unexposed people a carrier will infect) of the most virulent strains of COVID-19 is 3-8. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35262737/ (basic vs effective rate refers to the infectiveness in a naive population vs one which is taking measures and/or has immunity).
This is also all exponential so small increases in R number have big impacts nya.
