This illustrates why your vaccine choice matters to the rest of us

[CatherinaJTV]

one family's vaccine refusal killed one, another child, infected by the same unvaccinated pre-teen is still dying (since 2005):

justthevax.blogspot.com/2011/10/so-predictable-so-sad-natalie-dies-of.html

But it isn't that black and white is it?

Timescale of loss of maternal measles antibodies varies from population to population and from individual to individual, with many factors at play.

One of those factors is exposure to measles virus from the wider population for mothers (who have immunity). Currently there is a lack of natural 'boosting' of the mother's antibodies due to a waning of exposure to the virus - this is a direct result of high levels of vaccination. Reduced duration of maternal immunity is a direct consequence of mass vaccination.

To say that the parents 'will have to live with this for the rest of their lives' is blinkered and stupid (and cruel). You are failing to look at the wider,, more complex, picture.

Vaccination interferes with the natural mechanisms of disease. A lot of the time it interferes in good ways but there are undesired consequences too. The waning of maternal protection, and the resultant vulnerability of infants is one of them.

Age of measles infection appears to affect vulnerability to developing SSPE with infants under one year of age being more vulnerable.

Reported SSPE incidence is not black and white either and varies greatly.

ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/6/1334.full

Reported SSPE incidence varied greatly from approximately 0.2 to 40 cases per million population per year. Direct comparison of countries is problematic because methods and quality of ascertainment have been inconsistent. UK 8 and, more recently, USA9 data analyses have calculated true incidence of SSPE to be approximately 4?11 cases of SSPE per 100 000 cases of measles. A higher risk is associated with earlier infection: the risk following measles infection under 1 year of age was 18/100 000 compared with 1.1/100 000 after 5 years of age in the UK. Reported rates in Israel have been even higher reaching 23.2?27.9 cases of SSPE per 100 000 cases of measles between 1964 and 1969; with rates in those infected under 1 year of age cited as 360.3?375.6 cases/100 000 measles cases.

That was to the OP.

Your 'metaphor' is offensive - stop using it, it is sick, and makes it look like you don't understand the wider issues, and that you do not believe in the human right to informed consent and bodily integrity.

People have the right not to consume vaccines. And thank god they do - just look at the unethical vaccine schedule in the US which is a result of mandatory vaccination.

People have the right to informed consent.

People have the right to bodily integrity.

People have the right to refuse to consent to the administration of drugs which carry an unknown risk for the individual or the individual's children.

Also it is unethical and intellectually dishonest to argue the case for MMR vaccination as a result of measles infection.

OP do you campaign for the availability of the single measles vaccine?

The MMR triple vaccine is, by its very nature, unethical - a fact that seems to bother very few people, it certainly doesn't appear to bother the OP.

Why are SSPE rates so high in Germany? Even the pro-vax propaganda literature I've read doesn't state rates that high (for any age group). That's considerably higher than the rates I've seen for PNG which is meant to have the highest rates in the world. Where is this 1 in 2000 rate coming from - it contradicts everything I have read about SSPE from both sides. We're not cherry picking papers are we?

Was any investigation done on why one measles infection supposedly led to two independent non familial cases of SSPE - surely that's extraordinary, I find it pretty incredible- and should be of major interest to officials (is measles mutating to become more dangerous?)

Yes, thanks for some great posts there, Beachcomber.

"The right to bodily integrity" - is that a term actually used in human rights legislation? It speaks volumes, doesn't it?

saintlyjimjams,

this number comes from a German study, which unfortunately is not even online. I have a paper copy that I got from the author at the time. Basically, Germany is still seeing up to 8 new cases of SSPE a year (this may be going down, I have heard of one new one in 2011, but I have not looked intensively) for "only" about 5000 reported measles cases (10 years ago, fewer in recent years). If you try and factor in unreported cases, and then look at the age stratification (when the reported SSPE cases report having had measles) you come to the number of "at least 5 in 10'000" for the infant age group, which is what that paper says. I find this online: www.aerzteblatt.de/v4/archiv/artikel.asp?id=51670 which says from January 2003 to February 2006, 14 new cases of SSPE were notified (to the central registry in Würzburg) and 8 of them had been under a year old when they contracted measles. Given that this age group is still the minority of measles cases, their risk of developing SSPE is disproportionately higher in infants than in the general population (and the general population risk has been defined as just under 1 in 10'000 (SSPE case per reported case) in Germany and the US in the past 5 or 6 years (see: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16235165).

oh, and no investigation in this particular case that I know of.

How come it's not online? Which journal is it? Why hasn't there been more publicity given that the figures are so much higher than when measles was endemic? Surely that's worrying. Is measles mutating? Is this politics? Are the authors wrong? Are more infants in absolute terms contracting measles (I would doubt it consideting measles was common when i was growing up and i assume i was exposed as an infant) - if there are more infants then what's happening to their passive immunity?

Don't you think the numbers of cases raises huge numbers of questions?

Thank you for your pm btw - we really cannot buy a vantage lite off eBay as a) we don't have a spare few grand and b) we need the 4 year warranty for such an important device. Under the warranty DS1 would be given a device while his was in for repair - essential IMO. Of course I'd rather he didn't need it.

"Kinderärztliche Praxis" which is a German pediatric medicine journal - nothing high ranking, but then, the Bellini paper is and if they stratified by age they might find the same thing.

I think one possibility is that in previous years, kids prone to develop SSPE may have died acutely, rather than years later? Just one idea. The proportion of infants to contract measles in a given outbreak in pre-vaccine times was lower than today (I seem to recall 3 to 7% vs. 20 or 30% today) but mortality amongst infants was particulary high (depending on how far you go back up to the double digits), so if infants always contributed most SSPE cases, but a lot of them died of measles (due to pneumonia for example) and never lived to see the development of SSPE, that may contribute to the apparent shift. If you look at Pubmed, certainly, SSPE numbers have gone down dramatically (in the 60ies and 70ies, you'll find case series in the low hundreds, and now 14 is worth a report). The overall lower measles incidence and the possibility of genetic mapping (the kind that Bellini et al do, so which virus do you isolate from brain and how does that correspond to the strain that was circulating 10 years earlier) may have increased scrutiny of the cases that occur. Reporting is much better in Germany now than it has been world wide for decades (I emailed with Paul Dyken, the head of the US registry some years ago and he said that he often learned of cases by pure chance and that there was no regulated reporting procedure that would feed into his registry).

I totally understand about the ebay purchase and warranty issues. Hope you'll get one through "regular channels" soon.

They migt find the same thing? Really?

Sorry, I know i;ve been all emotional mummy on this thread and there are far better qualified people than I on this thread but if my research MA dussertation went in with the word might used in that way i'd have wasted years of work.

"may" and "might" are the qualifiers that you have to use when are not exactly sure what is going on, but you want to propose a possible explanation. As long as it is clear where data ends and hypothesis starts, there is nothing wrong with those words - Bellini at al discuss:

quote

The risk of SSPE calculated in the present study may be higher than the risk estimated for the period 1960?1974, in part because of the large number of cases of measles that occurred in young children during the 1989?1991 epidemic. It was noted that, in 1989 and 1990, the proportion of cases among children

No, may and might are what you say when you want it to look like you ahve evidence you don't. If you want to draw upon existing research to form a new hypothesis you state that it's what you are doing, and that it is pure conjecture warranting firther research.

peachy, I think you are just pissed at me - I made it clear that I am throwing ideas around and I posted my supporting evidence. Bellini et al do the same thing (with a lot more expertise and data in the field, obviously), so it appears you are more critical than the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

I don't really do pissed, I just think you ahve an agenda and that's always a big red warning sign for me.

Am I hyper critical? good. Explains the stats module grades then. Let us hope it transfers to the final research.

So it appears that this isn't being investigated?!

These numbers, if they are correct, are very worrying.

I have always held concerns about measles vaccination in terms of virus mutation, erosion of maternal immunity and exposure to a population that does not benefit from natural boosting of immunity/exposure to the virus.

Speculating that 'infants would have died in the past and therefore would not live long enough to develop SSPE' does not hold water as a scientific explanation.

Surely this is hugely concerning for Germany??

Good lord, I just reread carefully this post; Tue 25-Oct-11 16:56:37

Surely this begs the question, has mass measles vaccination resulted in worrying changes in the age distribution of measles infection?

Is the vaccine program making measles more dangerous, and leaving infants vulnerable?

Odd that potentially important info is not online.

Incidence rates are higher among infants now - yes. But surely not absolute numbers? If absolute numbers were higher then surely something would be seriously wrong with the vaccination program in that you've just made a disease a whole lot more dangerous.

I've never managed to find a source for absolute numbers (only proportions which is meaningless really). does anyone know of one? I've always assumed that although the proportion of infants getting measles is higher the actual numbers must be a lot smaller. Must be surely? It's numbers we need to know to make sense of the figures, not incidence rates.

The death rate from measles in healthy western children has been small for years - and before mmr. I doubt it could hide unaccounted cases of sspe. Is there any evidence that chikdren with pneumonia for example also woukd have gone on to develop sspe? My mum was seriously ill with measles - she didn't have sspe (obviously).

People arguing against vaccination get told off for making these sorts of suggestions.

Beachcomber, yes and no. If we look at the US, in pre-vaccine times, an underreported 80 infants died per year of measles, whereas, due to the measles vaccine, fewer than 80 infants contract measles each year. So if the risk of acute death is something like 1 in 1000, and the risk of SSPE is something like 1 in 2000, you would now need 12 years for one infant death to occur and 24 years for one case of SSPE (that is with a 2x MMR policy instead of the 1xMMR policy that was in place before the 1989-91 outbreak that led to the cases descibed by Bellini et al).

And yes, Germany is investigating the SSPE cases in the sense that they have a central registry which works well and collaborates with the Turkish SSPE experts group (Turkey has a very high incidence of SSPE), they characterize the viruses and there are groups like the Schneider-Schaulies group in Würzburg (the same city in which the registry is held as far as I know) that investigate wild, vaccine and mutant viruses.

Is there any evidence that chikdren with pneumonia for example also woukd have gone on to develop sspe?

none - as I said, just an idea...

Adding this link so I can read properly later

cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/4/855.full.pdf

"Turkey has a very high incidence of SSPE"

2.5/1,000,000 is "very high" now, is it?

That is about a tenth of C-Section's risk of mortality.

Will you be going on to childbirth threads now to warn pregnant women of CS's astronomical risk of mortality?

well - if you look in the latest paper on SSPE in Turkey, you see this:

The records of 76 patients (male : female ratio 3 : 1 [57 males, 19 females]) diagnosed with SSPE at Harran University Paediatric Neurology Clinic between 2005 and 2009 were available for analysis.

One hospital, 5 years, 76 cases - that is almost 16 per year and that is very high (and no, those are not all cases during that period and there are other hospitals that deal with SSPE in Turkey).

OP I don't understand your figures. You mention US deaths and number of cases, you use the 1 in 2000 SSPE rate, which you first posted in relation to Germany, and you link to no actual data.

I think it is concerning that infants in Germany are being infected with measles and, apparently, dying of SSPE as a result.

Mixing things up with figures from the US isn't helpful.