Thoraiya DyerFrankenstein Bacteria: Anti-Vaccination Folks Think Dead Whooping Cough Can Come Back To Life?
July 7th 2008 01:42
Some diseases out there are nasty enough that it’s well worth taking a minuscule side-effect risk to vaccinate against.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, starts off as an ordinary cold, but it ends up causing uncontrollable bouts of coughing, followed by a “whooping” sound as children struggle to draw breath.
Pertussis sufferers can choke on their own mucus, vomit, and turn red or blue; they can stop breathing, and they can develop pneumonia or middle ear infections to go with the cough.
Statistically (vaccination.org.au), 1 in 1000 pertussis cases will die from pneumonia or brain damage (1 in 200 infant cases), 1 in 3 will end up in hospital (3 in 5 infants), 1 in 50 will suffer from seizures and 1 in 30-40 will end up with pneumonia (17 in 100 infants).
Who wants whooping cough?
Not me!
Vaccination is the best weapon we have. The disease is caused by a bacteria, Bordetella pertussis. The current whooping cough vaccine, acellular pertussis, is part of the Infanrix vaccine, which also contains diptheria and tetanus. In Feb 1999, acellular replaced whole cell pertussis vaccines.
Instead of putting whole bacterial cells into the vaccine, only those parts of the bacteria thought to be important for immunity are measured into the mix.
Yet, on the anti-vaccination website ThinkTwice.com, we are told matter-of-factly that,
“Actually, it's the vaccinated children who spread disease. Many of the disease outbreaks that we are warned about today, are caused by, and occur in, recently vaccinated children.”
I’m intrigued.
Somehow, those little chopped-up pieces of bacteria are going to reassemble themselves, come back to life, and start spreading through the populace?
It’s FRANKENBACTERIA!
It’s aliiive….IT’S AAAAALLIIIIVVE!!
Well, easy for me to make fun of people, when what I should be doing is trying to understand and help them.
What makes a person decide not to vaccinate their child?
“In 1987 Holden et al calculated the benefit : harm ratios for each of the major vaccines, and found the overall a “typical program” of immunisation in a developing country could prevent 45 deaths and 12 serious handicaps per month, while causing 1 death every 22 years and 1 serious handicap every 7.5 years,” says Dr Sue Page, who, it seems, got a bit of a shock when she first moved to the Far North Coast.
“When I first moved to the Far North NSW Coast, I did not realise I was moving to the home of Australia’s anti-vaccination organisation. We had one-tenth the total population of NSW, but the lowest rate of vaccination. Consequently, we had the highest rate of vaccine-preventable disease, with one-third to one-half the NSW total cases occurring in our region alone.”
But maybe that’s just because hippies don’t wash? Sue has an answer to that one:
“In case you think this reflects poor hygiene in Nimbin-style communes, we only had one-tenth of the gastroenteritis and salmonella cases, or our fair share.”
”In the University of Sydney study published in ANZ Journal of Public Health, 1998, Professor Simon Chapman found people who oppose immunisation usually do so because of their views of the way doctors and drug companies operate, rather than an assessment of the facts. I agree, and discovered early on that non-vaccinators can be considered as two distinct groups of parents.
One group are the true conscientious objectors and their views are not going to be changed by quick debate. Often their own children have had some form of an adverse reaction, and they have manifested a basic distrust of doctors by seeking alternative health care. They are frequently educated and articulate people, and with sufficient time on their hands to read the internet and libraries avidly and to mount strong community campaigns.
Research shows they believe any or all of the following: that the immunisation program is an exercise of the power of medicine and the government authorities in society and they strongly oppose any infringement of civil liberties such as compulsory vaccination through schools; that drug companies are greedy multinationals who pay to have things covered up; that there is a conspiracy between drug companies, doctors, and the government; that even WHO receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, so it can’t be trusted; that the drugs themselves contain poisons and impurities and cause new diseases because they go against nature and are essentially evil; and that safe alternatives exist that are not being researched for financial reasons.”
I have heard those arguments before. I can see it might be difficult to persuade people that vaccines are safe when their child has come home from school with a red, swollen arm like a balloon.
Local reactions as a result of pertussis vaccine are fairly common, with a redness and swelling rate reported on the NCIRS fact sheet of 10-20% in children after their fourth booster, with 1-2% of children getting whole arm swelling.
A fat, swollen, painful arm is scary. Vaccines are not perfect. Their job is to get into a punch-up with your immune system so that when the REAL disease comes along, your white cells are already standing watch for it and know how to destroy it efficiently.
A slightly scarier notion is that if your child happens to contract a brain disease within 7 days of having the vaccination (probability is between 0 and 10 in a million), they are at increased risk of dying.
Zero in a million is not much to worry about. But 10 in a million is significant, I admit.
Not as significant as the following figure from the ABS ( Really Long Link ) that in the year 2000, 5 938 cases of whooping cough were reported. The disease remains all around us.
If vaccinating children is compulsory, then why is the disease all around us?
Two reasons.
One: efficacy of the vaccine is between 80 and 85% (Sydney Uni Fact Sheet on Pertussis Vaccines in Australia by the NCIRS ( Really Long Link )).
So, (borrowing from Dr Sue Page again), if the bacteria is 99% contagious, that means in a whooping cough epidemic, a vaccinated child has a 10-15% chance of contracting the disease while an unvaccinated child has a 99% chance of contracting it.
That answers this argument, from the anti-vaccination team:
“First of all, how could your non-vaccinated child be a danger to the vaccinated child? If the vaccines are effective, then the baby should be protected.”
The vaccine IS effective. Just not 100% effective.
The second reason we keep getting epidemics is not because vaccination rates are dropping, but because the vaccine only lasts 6-10 years, and people over the age of 20 are usually not covered. They give whooping cough to children under 6 months who have not yet been vaccinated, and that’s where the fatalities occur.
Suppose the conscientious objectors had their way, and nobody was vaccinated?
A quarter of a million children were born in the year 2000. If they were vaccinated in 2001 for whooping cough, and the very worst scenario occurred, with ten out of every million suffering neurological damage, that would leave 2.5 children affected.
If NONE of those children were vaccinated, they all got whooping cough and 1 in 200 died, then 1250 children would end up unnecessarily in the morgue.
And that’s why anti-vaccination campaigns are so terrifying.
Says Dr Sue,
“They make emotional appeals that are difficult to oppose because they feed into common parental anxieties and mount strong community campaigns against vaccination. These are the parents for whom the conscientious objectors' ACIR forms were made.”
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
According to her, there are a second group of parents who choose not to vaccinate.
“In my experience, the larger group of non-vaccinators are parents who have been influenced by these views without having the time to fully research the information themselves, and this is the group you can help the most time-efficiently by reality checking their beliefs.”
Thank heavens for that. Maybe some of those in the second group will find their way to my blog.
Then again, maybe not. In a March 1998 study from the University of Sydney:
“The message, says Associate Professor Simon Chapman, who was one of those involved, is that doctors and Governments can't afford to be patronising or arrogant in this debate. They need to be much more tuned into peoples' views rather than thinking the facts alone are going to convince parents who are resisting immunising their children.”
I can’t help myself. I like numbers. And I often come across as patronising and arrogant, but that’s just because some people don’t deserve to be taken seriously. When naïve parents send letters like this to ThinkTwice:
“Q. When I told my doctor that I am not going to have my children vaccinated, he (she) became very angry and told me that he will not treat them, and that I am no longer welcome in his office. Do you have a list of doctors in my area who will respect my decision to not vaccinate and still treat my children?”
…they deserve a better answer than this:
“A. Your situation is not uncommon. Many pediatricians refuse to treat children when their parents object to the shots. This is just one tactic doctors employ in an effort to intimidate moms and dads into vaccinating against their will. You should be thankful that this dysfunctional relationship with your health practitioner has been terminated.
I'm sorry, but we do not maintain a directory of "sympathetic" pediatricians, and are unaware of any such list. You might try searching for a naturopathic, homeopathic, or chiropractic doctor in your yellow pages. By the way, why do you need a baby doctor? According to Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, MD, very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention.”
OK, so the doctor might have been more sympathetic (although we don’t get the doctor’s side of the story), but how DARE the second degree murderers at ThinkTwice say things like “very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention” when the death rates are there for all to see?
How can anyone be so negligent?
All I can do is send out a plea to the universe: Please keep your vaccinations, and your children’s vaccinations up to date.
I’ll leave you with this abstract from a 1998 study in the Lancet:
“To assess the impact of anti-vaccine movements that targeted pertussis whole-cell vaccines, we compared pertussis incidence in countries where high coverage with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines (DTP) was maintained (Hungary, the former East Germany, Poland, and the United States) with countries where immunization was disrupted by anti-vaccine movements (Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, The Russian Federation, Ireland, Italy, the former West Germany, and Australia).
Pertussis incidence was 10 to 100 times lower in countries where high vaccine coverage was maintained than in countries where immunization programs were compromised by anti-vaccine movements…our study shows that, far from being obsolete, these vaccines continue to have an important role in global immunization.”
Whooping cough, or pertussis, starts off as an ordinary cold, but it ends up causing uncontrollable bouts of coughing, followed by a “whooping” sound as children struggle to draw breath.
Pertussis sufferers can choke on their own mucus, vomit, and turn red or blue; they can stop breathing, and they can develop pneumonia or middle ear infections to go with the cough.
Statistically (vaccination.org.au), 1 in 1000 pertussis cases will die from pneumonia or brain damage (1 in 200 infant cases), 1 in 3 will end up in hospital (3 in 5 infants), 1 in 50 will suffer from seizures and 1 in 30-40 will end up with pneumonia (17 in 100 infants).
Who wants whooping cough?
Image from NHSborders.org.uk
Not me!
Vaccination is the best weapon we have. The disease is caused by a bacteria, Bordetella pertussis. The current whooping cough vaccine, acellular pertussis, is part of the Infanrix vaccine, which also contains diptheria and tetanus. In Feb 1999, acellular replaced whole cell pertussis vaccines.
Instead of putting whole bacterial cells into the vaccine, only those parts of the bacteria thought to be important for immunity are measured into the mix.
Yet, on the anti-vaccination website ThinkTwice.com, we are told matter-of-factly that,
“Actually, it's the vaccinated children who spread disease. Many of the disease outbreaks that we are warned about today, are caused by, and occur in, recently vaccinated children.”
I’m intrigued.
Somehow, those little chopped-up pieces of bacteria are going to reassemble themselves, come back to life, and start spreading through the populace?
It’s FRANKENBACTERIA!
It’s aliiive….IT’S AAAAALLIIIIVVE!!
Well, easy for me to make fun of people, when what I should be doing is trying to understand and help them.
What makes a person decide not to vaccinate their child?
“In 1987 Holden et al calculated the benefit : harm ratios for each of the major vaccines, and found the overall a “typical program” of immunisation in a developing country could prevent 45 deaths and 12 serious handicaps per month, while causing 1 death every 22 years and 1 serious handicap every 7.5 years,” says Dr Sue Page, who, it seems, got a bit of a shock when she first moved to the Far North Coast.
“When I first moved to the Far North NSW Coast, I did not realise I was moving to the home of Australia’s anti-vaccination organisation. We had one-tenth the total population of NSW, but the lowest rate of vaccination. Consequently, we had the highest rate of vaccine-preventable disease, with one-third to one-half the NSW total cases occurring in our region alone.”
But maybe that’s just because hippies don’t wash? Sue has an answer to that one:
“In case you think this reflects poor hygiene in Nimbin-style communes, we only had one-tenth of the gastroenteritis and salmonella cases, or our fair share.”
”In the University of Sydney study published in ANZ Journal of Public Health, 1998, Professor Simon Chapman found people who oppose immunisation usually do so because of their views of the way doctors and drug companies operate, rather than an assessment of the facts. I agree, and discovered early on that non-vaccinators can be considered as two distinct groups of parents.
One group are the true conscientious objectors and their views are not going to be changed by quick debate. Often their own children have had some form of an adverse reaction, and they have manifested a basic distrust of doctors by seeking alternative health care. They are frequently educated and articulate people, and with sufficient time on their hands to read the internet and libraries avidly and to mount strong community campaigns.
Research shows they believe any or all of the following: that the immunisation program is an exercise of the power of medicine and the government authorities in society and they strongly oppose any infringement of civil liberties such as compulsory vaccination through schools; that drug companies are greedy multinationals who pay to have things covered up; that there is a conspiracy between drug companies, doctors, and the government; that even WHO receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, so it can’t be trusted; that the drugs themselves contain poisons and impurities and cause new diseases because they go against nature and are essentially evil; and that safe alternatives exist that are not being researched for financial reasons.”
I have heard those arguments before. I can see it might be difficult to persuade people that vaccines are safe when their child has come home from school with a red, swollen arm like a balloon.
Local reactions as a result of pertussis vaccine are fairly common, with a redness and swelling rate reported on the NCIRS fact sheet of 10-20% in children after their fourth booster, with 1-2% of children getting whole arm swelling.
A fat, swollen, painful arm is scary. Vaccines are not perfect. Their job is to get into a punch-up with your immune system so that when the REAL disease comes along, your white cells are already standing watch for it and know how to destroy it efficiently.
A slightly scarier notion is that if your child happens to contract a brain disease within 7 days of having the vaccination (probability is between 0 and 10 in a million), they are at increased risk of dying.
Zero in a million is not much to worry about. But 10 in a million is significant, I admit.
Not as significant as the following figure from the ABS ( Really Long Link ) that in the year 2000, 5 938 cases of whooping cough were reported. The disease remains all around us.
If vaccinating children is compulsory, then why is the disease all around us?
Two reasons.
One: efficacy of the vaccine is between 80 and 85% (Sydney Uni Fact Sheet on Pertussis Vaccines in Australia by the NCIRS ( Really Long Link )).
So, (borrowing from Dr Sue Page again), if the bacteria is 99% contagious, that means in a whooping cough epidemic, a vaccinated child has a 10-15% chance of contracting the disease while an unvaccinated child has a 99% chance of contracting it.
That answers this argument, from the anti-vaccination team:
“First of all, how could your non-vaccinated child be a danger to the vaccinated child? If the vaccines are effective, then the baby should be protected.”
The vaccine IS effective. Just not 100% effective.
The second reason we keep getting epidemics is not because vaccination rates are dropping, but because the vaccine only lasts 6-10 years, and people over the age of 20 are usually not covered. They give whooping cough to children under 6 months who have not yet been vaccinated, and that’s where the fatalities occur.
Suppose the conscientious objectors had their way, and nobody was vaccinated?
A quarter of a million children were born in the year 2000. If they were vaccinated in 2001 for whooping cough, and the very worst scenario occurred, with ten out of every million suffering neurological damage, that would leave 2.5 children affected.
If NONE of those children were vaccinated, they all got whooping cough and 1 in 200 died, then 1250 children would end up unnecessarily in the morgue.
And that’s why anti-vaccination campaigns are so terrifying.
Says Dr Sue,
“They make emotional appeals that are difficult to oppose because they feed into common parental anxieties and mount strong community campaigns against vaccination. These are the parents for whom the conscientious objectors' ACIR forms were made.”
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
According to her, there are a second group of parents who choose not to vaccinate.
“In my experience, the larger group of non-vaccinators are parents who have been influenced by these views without having the time to fully research the information themselves, and this is the group you can help the most time-efficiently by reality checking their beliefs.”
Thank heavens for that. Maybe some of those in the second group will find their way to my blog.
Then again, maybe not. In a March 1998 study from the University of Sydney:
“The message, says Associate Professor Simon Chapman, who was one of those involved, is that doctors and Governments can't afford to be patronising or arrogant in this debate. They need to be much more tuned into peoples' views rather than thinking the facts alone are going to convince parents who are resisting immunising their children.”
I can’t help myself. I like numbers. And I often come across as patronising and arrogant, but that’s just because some people don’t deserve to be taken seriously. When naïve parents send letters like this to ThinkTwice:
“Q. When I told my doctor that I am not going to have my children vaccinated, he (she) became very angry and told me that he will not treat them, and that I am no longer welcome in his office. Do you have a list of doctors in my area who will respect my decision to not vaccinate and still treat my children?”
…they deserve a better answer than this:
“A. Your situation is not uncommon. Many pediatricians refuse to treat children when their parents object to the shots. This is just one tactic doctors employ in an effort to intimidate moms and dads into vaccinating against their will. You should be thankful that this dysfunctional relationship with your health practitioner has been terminated.
I'm sorry, but we do not maintain a directory of "sympathetic" pediatricians, and are unaware of any such list. You might try searching for a naturopathic, homeopathic, or chiropractic doctor in your yellow pages. By the way, why do you need a baby doctor? According to Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, MD, very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention.”
OK, so the doctor might have been more sympathetic (although we don’t get the doctor’s side of the story), but how DARE the second degree murderers at ThinkTwice say things like “very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention” when the death rates are there for all to see?
How can anyone be so negligent?
All I can do is send out a plea to the universe: Please keep your vaccinations, and your children’s vaccinations up to date.
I’ll leave you with this abstract from a 1998 study in the Lancet:
“To assess the impact of anti-vaccine movements that targeted pertussis whole-cell vaccines, we compared pertussis incidence in countries where high coverage with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines (DTP) was maintained (Hungary, the former East Germany, Poland, and the United States) with countries where immunization was disrupted by anti-vaccine movements (Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, The Russian Federation, Ireland, Italy, the former West Germany, and Australia).
Pertussis incidence was 10 to 100 times lower in countries where high vaccine coverage was maintained than in countries where immunization programs were compromised by anti-vaccine movements…our study shows that, far from being obsolete, these vaccines continue to have an important role in global immunization.”
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