Son has measles

[melodiousmoan]

Why do people not vaccinate their kids? My child has been vaccinated but only had his first lot as is 20 months. He has contracted measles. I chose to vaccinate him against this. Ill advised people that think if they dont vaccinate there's only a slim chance your child will get this disease you're wrong. You're increasing everyone's chance of contracting the illness by ruining the herd immunity that this country had created. Not only are you doing this, you're increasing people with compromised immune systems' chance of death. I feel terrible that my child has to go through this because of others lack of understanding.

There will always be some for whom the vaccine does not provide immunity, whether the 5% after the first one -as your ds - or even after the second. It simply doesn't give 100% protection . Interesting most of Europe offer the mmr booster at 18 months, which I thought UK was adopting but presumably not universally yet. Maybe that should be the focus of your issue ?

The problem remains though in that you introduce a jab at a time when there is a population with high naturally acquired immunity & circulating disease. Population immunity in those circumstances is quite possibly going to be very different to that found in populations where the vast majority of immunity is derived from vaccination and the disease is not circulating. Watch for the next 20 years or so, and if they collect clinically useful (rather than politically useful) data perhaps we'll find out.

I think this is a potential serious concern with measles vaccination. We have no idea what will happen in the future - we do know that measles is much more virulent in populations which have had no contact with it. I worry that a population which has vaccine induced immunity and no past contact with circulating wild disease would be extremely vulnerable to an outbreak.

Not got anything to say to the OP other than, as an ex teacher, it really grates when people use 'less' and 'fewer' incorrectly. And I have a vaccine damaged child and I can assure you that she exists. Doctors have NO IDEA whether her younger sister is at risk for similar damage or not. NO IDEA. They do not know and do not know how to find out. They don't even know where to start.

I don't think increased virulence is a problem yet beachcomber. We won't have un-evolved the however many generations of co-evolution with the measles virus that quickly. It's different for populations meeting it for the first time in their history though.

The lack of passive immunity in babies does concern me. Of course this is only an issue if they find that vaccine induced immunity doesn't last in a population with very limited naturally acquired immunity & no circulating disease. And so far that's not all that clear.

It may be that it's still worth vaccinating against measles. Think the argument for mumps vaccination is distinctly dodgy though (although that was introduced on economic grounds snyway)

'that's because vaccine damage doesn't exist and it is neurotic mothers that over analyse and scaremonger that have left this country wide open to measles.'

ROFL

I actually now feel sorry for Catherine and Corus, having you on their 'side'. Research them and their posts. They are both strongly pro but would never say anything so silly. You might learn how better to argue your case.

I haven't vaccinated yet. I am not relying on others who do. Very few people do this.

I have made the decision that I'd rather my child had measles than the vaccination. It is a valid decision. I would have made the choice regardless of how many 'others' were vaccinated and actually, I feel I am putting my child MORE at risk because of those who selfishly vaccinate and have eradicated the opportunity to come into contact with mild forms and therefore boost my children's overall immunity.

'yes, I'm happy to accept there may be vaccine-damaged children, and I think the risk of vaccine damage is a price worth paying to avert the greater risks of not vaccinating'

But nobody IS paying. Get a vaccine damaged child, consume your every waking hour for 10 years with a court case that intrudes and vilifies you, get a small amount of money that in no way makes up for your 10 years of lost life, lost career, and the fact that your family has been plunged into poverty and then have to listen to people forever patronise you and say they can understand why you 'think' your child was vaccine damaged but really they weren't.

Do you think it has the potential to become a problem saintly?

I agree with you about the concern of passive immunity in babies. And I just wonder how resistant a population of third generation vaccinated would be to an outbreak. That is a population where there has been no conferring of natural immunity (baby born to vaccinated mother who was also born to vaccinated mother).

So can you not get the single measles vaccine anywhere now?

Oh I think we're talking about different things beachcomber. Yes possibly an outbreak could be thousands if population immunity alters but I don't think individual cases would be worse than historically (with the exception that the 'wr

'Wrong age' might be getting it.

But I don't think it would be as devastating as it would be to a population with no measles in their history.

I wish I bookmarked interesting things when I read them and then knew how to find them again but...

I recently read a piece discussing outbreaks in almost fully vaccinated polulations and how waning immunity was an unquantifiable factor in this. It also discussed that the presumed lifelong immunity from freely acquired childhood diseases was perhaps not life long at all but periodically boosted immunity due to contact with freely circulating diseases.

Yes, agree with you on the 'wrong age' thing. And with what MistyB mentions about lack of natural boosting when disease is not circulating.

MistyB - yes, they've found that with Chickenpox in the US. The vaccine was introduced in Japan but doesn't have a very high uptake so there is plenty of CP circulating to 'boost' the immunity of the people who have been vaccinated. In the US, the high percentage of people that have been vaccinated mean that there are fewer wild CP cases and therefore the immunity from the vaccine wanes and they have had to introduce a booster for it. It was only introduced in 2006/2007 so it will be a few years before they know if another one is required.

Yes my understanding matches all yours - they're just realising how important circulating disease is in maintaining immunity. Especially for vaccine induced immunity, but for naturally acquired as well. Maybe humans will end up like dogs & there will be annual boosters of everything?

Maybe humans will end up like dogs & there will be annual boosters of everything?

Cats too. But maybe people would decide not to bother? One reason for having a cat vaccinated is if you need to put them in the cattery. If you never send them to the cattery you might decide it's unnecessary. Adults may well decide that there are potentially so many bacteria and viruses that could cause illness that we will never vaccinate against them all, so they will take their chance.

I'm sure there'd be some people that would go for it though!

Well the pharma companies would be keen

Seriously - in 2002 radio 4 had an MMR debate where people could phone in. My friend rang and spoke to one of dept of health bigwigs who had been wheeled in and pointed out that at some stage they were going to have to start dishing out adult MMR boosters or you'd just shift everything out of childhood and into adulthood- and mr bigwig agreed with him!

I wonder about the effectiveness of the MMR. I had wild rubella as a child of about 5. then had two doses of MMR (it was given in schools then).

In my pregnancies with dd and ds1 I was immune to rubella and so not offered any jabs. Later in an nhs occupational health blood test my immunity to all three was tested, I had no measles or mumps immunity. The solution? I was given another MMR, but not offered any follow up blood to see if it worked.

I have had another baby, my immunity to rubella remains but no idea if I have any protection against males or mumps.

Immunity to males ?

But the MMR is given to women without immunity to rubella because the single rubella jab is not available on the NHS. The aim is to protect against congenital rubella syndrome, so they would not be particularly interested in whether you were immune to the other two.

My friend had her son's immunity tested after two doses of MMR. He showed no immunity to measles after either dose. At which stage she got cross.

There is a peer reviewed paper out there someone (cba to search) which showed that people with autism were less likely to develop immunity to ? one of them - rubella I think- after MMR.

Hm really can't find that paper. Perhaps I dreamed it . It's going to bug me now!

OP and others of a similar ilk: if you have establishment views on vaccines (as I do) and are scratching your heads over some of the more extreme vaccine-sceptic attitudes on this thread, you may find this interesting: Trusting Blindly Can Be The Biggest Risk Of All

It's very hard for someone in the mainstream view to get into the heads of the vaccine-sceptic camp without labelling them as idiots / freeloaders / etc. If you are genuinely into in everyone getting to come kind of collective truth, and talking to people who have a very different view from yourselves without an instant argument then I totally recommend you read the link above. Also Andrew Wakefield's book. How can it hurt?

This is going to seem strange to someone who hasn't read up about this, but there are plenty of perfectly normal people who sincerely believe that prominent pro-vaccine figures are deliberately making money from the deaths of children. My only attempt at talking to vaccine-sceptics on MN ended when the talk started taking this kind of direction.

Happily that's on the fringe of things (read the "whale" vaccine site if you want this in its purest form).

Anyway the vaccine-sceptics are not crazy but come at the facts from a very different angle from you and so will have an interpretation you find very hard to understand. They are honest and sincere. They also react very badly to being accused of playing fast and loose with the lives of the non-vaccinated herd.

Very glad to hear your child is recovering. Measles is still potentially a killer and we are extremely lucky to live in a country where the incidence is so low, whatever reason we ascribe to this.

Oh FFS

Along with quite a few others on this thread I vaccinated right up until the time I had reason not to. My son lost his ability to talk & has never regained it. At which stage I read pretty much everything about his condition & spoke to experts in his condition. And took on board what they said & made decisions based on that.

My son will never live independently & I didn't want the same fate to befall his brothers. However much you want to people like me don't exist (there are enough of us on this thread) I'm afraid we do.

BTW -OP was the measles confirmed by a blood test? There's been a big rise in scarlet fever cases this year which can look similar although the rash comes up in a different order.

Thanks CorusKate. The problem with getting overly polarised is nuance gets dropped and everyone starts assuming bad faith or ignorance on the other side and stops thinking.

Once I started reading vaccine-sceptic stuff with some respect, I noticed a lot of interesting things that the standard pro-vax perspective finds it uncomfortable to acknowledge.

A simple example is Fluenz & Muslim resistance due to porcine gelatin being in the vaccine. The official attitude at the time of this (2013) was very dismissive, alluding to a 1995 seminar where a pro-gelatin position was taken. But owadays the position re porcine gelatin across the Muslim world is far more fragmented, following DNA sequencing advances making it practical to identify gelatine more precisely, and official policy had not caught up with this.

There are plenty of other questions around vaccines where nuance gets dropped and people can't talk sensibly. I personally find the debate around the last stages of polio elimination & consequent vaccine side effects is worth a look too.

You can think someone's wrong in their general take re vaccines without treating them like an idiot or some kind of selfish monster, or dismissing their opinions en masse.