Measels outbreak traced back to unvaccinated 17 year-old

by Jonathon Morgan (Subscribe to Jonathon Morgan's posts)
Dec 22nd 2006 9:24AM

2005 saw 66 measles cases in the US -- nearly double that of 2004. Health officials can now trace 33 of those cases back to a 17 year-old from Indiana.

The girl had recently traveled to Romania without getting vaccinated, and unknowingly carried the disease back to the United States. The subsequent outbreak put three people in the hospital, including one health-care working who was treated in intensive care.

Out of the 34 people that contracted the disease, only two had been vaccinated. Despite assertions from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the measles-containing vaccine is safe, many parents still chose not to vaccinate their children due to safety concerns.

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David Schloss 12-22-2006 @ 5:36PM

66 cases of measles in the US out of a population of 300,000,000 residents seems like a pretty good argument for not risking autism from a measles vaccine.

To put it another way, an unvaccinated resident has a 1 in 4,545,454 chance of contracting measles per annum.

That puts the odds of DYING by falling out of a building (1:484,750) 10 times greater than the risk of contracting measles (and not dying). You're more likely to DIE via exploding (1:1,978,571), from contact with wasps and bees (1:4,406,818), freeze to death (469,113), intentional self poisoning (1:53,250) and so on than even getting and recovering from measles. (Source, National Safety Council: http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm)

Yet estimates for U.S. autism rates for live birth is 4.5 per 1000 (pediatricservices.com and other sites) which puts it at about 1:222.

With so many concerned about the mercury in the vaccines contributing to the rise in autism rates, and with the chances of contracting treatable measles 1:300,000,000 and the chances of having autism being 1:222, which is a more risky decision?