Ignorance is the Real Disease: Measles on the Rise in Europe due to AntiVaxxers
February 24, 2018
Before the measles vaccine existed, 9 out of every 10 kids got the disease before age 15. Two million people died from it every year. It’s easy for most of us to forget that, because we’ve had an effective measles vaccine since 1960.
Measles is so infectious that it spreads to 90 percent of those who come in contact with an infected person, though symptoms don’t occur until at least a week later. It starts with the usual: a fever, a cough, a runny nose. A few days later, you develop little white spots inside your mouth. The rash begins soon after. Red dots spread from your hairline all the way down to your feet and your fever spikes, sometimes soaring over 104°F. Most people survive, but if there are complications, death rates can hit up to 30 percent. Pneumonia is the most common fatal side-effect, but patients can also experience swelling of the brain, which can cause permanent deafness or blindness. Prior to the invention of the vaccine, between 15,000 and 60,000 people went blind because of the measles each year.
And yet, despite having a cheap way to prevent one of the most infectious diseases in the world, most countries in Europe still haven’t met the target goal for vaccination coverage. That means those countries continue to have deadly outbreaks.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
February 24, 2018 at 2:47 pm
Hard to ‘like’ this. Ignorance is a dangerous thing…
February 24, 2018 at 4:41 pm
The scientific and medical communities are not together on this. Pharma has paid a fortune to mold public opinion to their needs on this issue. Doctors, like those in this video, don’t know the science. It’s amazing how public opinion has been so manipulated. You know climate science and you know how important it is to know the science. Sure there has been success in the past with some major diseases but there is good scientific information on how much harm the vaccines can do.
There are better ways to avoid diseases such as with high-dose vitamins D and C. Maintaining a strong immune system is the key. The harm that vaccines are doing to children is getting drowned out by the industry’s huge investment in pushing vaccines.
February 24, 2018 at 4:48 pm
Lord love a duck! It’s not enough that we have to put up with climate science deniers on Crock, but now we’ve got a vaccine denier here. At least he didn’t tell us that praying to god (pick one of the many) is the answer.
February 24, 2018 at 4:56 pm
PS F orgot to ask for some proof that “Doctors don’t know the science” and “there is good scientific information on how much harm the vaccines can do” or the qualifications of this commenter.
February 25, 2018 at 3:45 am
First evidence please.
Second you do realise that the vaccination process depends on and utilises the immune system, by giving it the picture of what it is to fight against, before it is invaded and overwhelmed.
You may wish to look up some history books to find out what it was like before vaccination.
It wasn’t the Spanish that slaughtered the Mayans and Aztecs, nor the Colonists that decimated the American Indian, it was the diseases they brought with them, measles, small pox , etc etc.
Rubella, small pox etc are so nasty and with a high fatality rate along with one we tend to forget about since vaccination, that took out so many , just from a scratch or a rose thorn prick – Tetanus.
Hundreds of thousands will suffer and die needlessly and as it starts to reach plague proportions which it will as it always has, the victims and their families will be seeking answers and justice.
Can you give them either. ?
February 25, 2018 at 10:31 am
That is total BS. So much for any risk management advice you could offer.
This message is coming from one who suffered from measles as a kid which was far from pleasant, I also caught chicken pox at about the same time with one rolling on into the other I cannot remember which came first.
I was lucky to get away with enough to be able to pass a medical for naval service if that had been a stumbling block my dreams would have been dashed and I would have had a very different life. What I did discover is that I suffered a cardiac arrest, at the end of an arduous assault course type record challenge run, and didn’t realise it significance until later a few months after suffering a cardiac arrest bad enough to put me in ICU and being puzzled by the medics keep asking me if I had one before. It was not until that point that I thought back to that day pushing gear up a hill to a finish line.
Now measles may or may not have had a hand in this but there is a distinct possibility.
Complications from measles
Now you stop spreading dangerous lies.
February 25, 2018 at 11:24 am
I too am old enough to have suffered from measles, chicken pox, and mumps as a child in the 1940’s—-think I was in the hospital briefly for one of them (measles maybe?)—don’t remember much about it except that I was given a lot of ice cream during the mumps, and that was OK. Never caught whooping cough, luckily.
What I DO remember clearly is the polio epidemic of the late 40’s—–scary as hell with all the pictures of people in iron lungs. They closed the municipal pool in my home town—-much moaning and groaning since we kids went down there almost every day in the summer.
I recall being “shot” with half a dozen vaccines at once in the USMC using those no-needle pressurized guns. Don’t know what they gave us but since we might be going to faraway places we weren’t complaining. I was unlucky enough to have the corpsman “slip” with the gun and spray vaccines all over me and also cause some bleeding—I got a “sorry” and was sent to the side with a bottle of alcohol and some gauze to clean up.
IMO, the polio and smallpox vaccines are among man’s greatest medical accomplishments.
PS Dr. Alan Roth appears to be a nice guy who is just a bit crackpotty about vitamin D. Don’t know how he wandered onto Crock to proselytize, but he has little or NO training that would qualify him to comment on either vaccines or climate change.
February 26, 2018 at 7:23 am
I remember that only too well had friends who became ill and disabled with that. I also remember getting the Polio jab as a young teen. Cycled to the vacc’ centre, had the jab and remembering being told no extreme exercise for about 24 hours. Too bad as I had 3 miles to cycle, with some steep hills along the way, to get home.
Also remember a day I went and gave blood, up into the low twenties by this time, completely forgetting that the unit I was on at an air station in deepest Somerset were expecting me to be in the rugby team for a fixture that afternoon. Some very strange feelings during that match. Had my tot of rum (neat) to recover in early evening which had more of a kick than usual. Hey! Ho! Life expectancy didn’t seem to be that long at that time, heavy attrition in the fixed wing sea going air arm, and with no dependants so had a rather blasé attitude, lived life to the full.
February 27, 2018 at 3:22 am
It would be karmic justice if only it were the anti-vaxxers that died out because of their mistaken convictions and taking their stupidity with them.
Unfortunately, their moronic views threaten everybody, especially those too young to yet be inoculated.
There’s a big difference between 95% and 99% inoculation of a population – a virus may find enough hosts to be able to spread, or not.
February 27, 2018 at 9:34 am
To take the “rational fatalist” view, there are too many humans anyway, and efforts to feed them and immunize them are all going to collapse at some future time, so why worry.
Putting that aside, and assuming that the human species IS so wonderful that it deserves preservation, a much bigger worry is that these wonderful anti-vaxxers are providing a population in which the viruses are able to simply grow and reproduce in large numbers—-and growing and reproducing is when viruses demonstrate one of their major “tricks”—-the ability to change or mutate, and pass those changes down rapidly. That’s why we have to come up with “new” flu vaccines each year when old versions lose effectiveness against mutated strains.
Do recall the 1918 flu epidemic, which was so catastrophic—-it was a mutated strain of an “old” flu, and the now big worry about bird flu in Asia mutating so that it can more easily infect humans.
February 27, 2018 at 11:33 am
The onset of that began a few years earlier with a comparatively small number of cases which, as you rightly point out, due to unprecedented number and rapidity of movement within and between continents mutated, with outbreaks in succeeding years, and developed a lethality not previously seen. Killed more than the violence of WW1.
‘Catching Cold: 1918’s Forgotten Tragedy and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused it’ by Pete Davis tells the story, paperback editions are available.