vaccination
lborkowski | May 22, 2014by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
As an editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy, I have been following developments where public health intersects with the activities and policies of espionage agencies. New happenings appear regularly.
First there was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) creation of a special immunization campaign in Pakistan, where the only purpose of the program was to collect material containing DNA that stuck on the needles used to deliver hepatitis vaccine. The Agency hoped to find Osama Bin Laden. We published an editorial that predicted the terrible damage that…
kkrisberg | March 14, 2014It’s not the first study to examine the enormous health and economic benefits of vaccines. But it’s certainly another impressive reminder about the power — and value — of prevention.
In a study published online earlier this month in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that childhood immunizations among babies born in 2009 will prevent 42,000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, saving the nation $13.5 billion in directs costs (medical costs and disease outbreak control) and more than $68 billion in total societal costs (premature death and lost productivity). That means that…
cmonforton | December 9, 2013I spent Sunday morning in the ER of my local community hospital in Hays County, Texas. While my husband lay on the gurney having an IV line inserted, I distracted his attention by conversing with the nurse. I can’t recall what prompted it, but the nurse, Elizabeth, offered her experience with this year’s influenza season.
“I’ve been an ER nurse for 10 years. When it comes to the flu, this year was a lot different. We’ve only seen a handful of cases.”
Like many U.S. hospitals, it's used by the community for primary care.
I asked Elizabeth if she had any ideas to explain why they're not seeing…
gregladen | August 25, 2013Apparently, there is a Faith Healer [who] Convinces Followers To Never Vaccinate, [and] Now Church [is] The Center Of Measles Outbreak
The Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, run by Kenneth Copeland Ministries, has long been a strong anti-vaccination stronghold. Now, it is the epicenter of a major outbreak of Measles in the United States.
And, here is a poll that asks: Should anti-vaccine parents be held liable if their child spreads an illness?
Say an unvaccinated child has the measles and passes the disease onto a baby who’s too young to be vaccinated. If that baby gets…
lborkowski | May 9, 2013Earlier this week, a UN official told AFP that a child in North Waziristan, Pakistan had contracted polio -- the first reported case since tribesman in North Waziristan stopped authorities from conducted a vaccination campaign in June last year. AFP explains:
The Taliban alleged that the campaign was a cover for espionage.
Efforts to tackle the highly infectious disease have been hampered over the years by local suspicion about vaccines being a plot to sterilise Muslims, particularly in Pakistan's conservative and poorly educated northwest.
"We are worried because this new case comes as an…
lborkowski | February 5, 2013Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which many workers still rely on to assure that they can return to their jobs after taking unpaid time off for a new baby or to deal with a serious illness - their own or a family member's. But, NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports, 40% of the workforce is ineligible for the leave, including those working fewer than 25 hours per week with an employer (even if they have multiple part-time jobs), workers at businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and those who want to care for a family member who doesn't meet the official "…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2013The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2012. Both the Enlightener award and the Deceiver award are given to the editorial staff of programmes on Swedish national radio.
Medierna is a weekly media criticism show. They roast journalists in an excellently skeptical fashion and have during the year touched upon mistreatment of subjects such as climatology, alternative medicine and vaccination.
Nyhetsguiden is a daily news analysis show. In April and May they ran several anecdote-based antivaccine stories about the ongoing effort to vaccinate prepubescent girls against the…
lborkowski | December 20, 2012Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is still circulating (Afghanistan and Nigeria are the others), and its eradication efforts have just encountered a horrific setback: Over the course of 48 hours, gunmen shot and killed eight vaccination workers in and around Karachi and Peshawar. The United Nations has pulled off the streets all staff involved in the polio vaccination campaign. Jibran Ahmad reports for Reuters that the government is nonetheless determined to continue immunization efforts:
Karachi police spokesman Imran Shaukat said teams were supposed to tell police of their…
gregladen | November 5, 2012This is an interview at Atheists Talk (TV), an update on the war on science, and a rare opportunity to see me wearing a suit.
The first few seconds are sound free; do not adjust your television set.
I mentioned the NCSE, here's their web site.
Here's a couple of books related to the topic:
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto
Something on crying babies and vaccination is here, and something on milk allergy is here.
Minnesota Atheists YouTube channel is…
lborkowski | September 5, 2012By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have studied vaccines and vaccine policy for almost forty years, The Pump Handle has invited me to provide its readers with some big-picture background on vaccines and vaccination policy in the US and around the world to accompany the link to my editorial.
School Entry Laws
In the 1970s, public health…
tsmith | June 22, 2012This is the fifteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Cassie Klostermann.
One of the major accomplishments that public health professionals pride themselves in is the reduction of people getting sick or dying from preventable infectious diseases. Unfortunately, these debilitating, historic diseases that health professionals had once thought they had under control are starting to rear their ugly heads once again in the United States (U.S.). One of these diseases that I am referring to is measles. Measles is a highly contagious virus (from the genus Morbillivirus) spread through the air…
lborkowski | April 25, 2012Today is World Malaria Day, and the World Health Organization has launched a new initiative, dubbed T3: Test, Treat, Track. It urges countries where malaria is endemic to test every suspected malaria case, treat every confirmed case with anti-malarial medicine, and track the disease with "timely and accurate surveillance systems." The good news is that scaled-up malaria prevention and control efforts -- including delivery of 145 million insecticidal bed nets in 2010 alone -- have saved a million lives over the past decade. But, the WHO points out, there's still a long way to go in combating…
lborkowski | November 22, 2011by Kim Krisberg
It's too early to tell just how many families Elizabeth Frerking and her colleagues at the Saline County Health Department in Marshall, Mo., will have to turn away, but it's likely to be too many. As of Oct. 1 and due to cuts in federal immunization funding, Frerking can only administer vaccines to children with no insurance at all or those with Medicaid coverage. However, it wasn't always like that.
"Previously, any family could come here and get immunizations -- we didn't turn anybody away," Frerking, the department's vaccine coordinator, told me. "Now, we get to be the ones…
lborkowski | November 7, 2011By Mark Pendergrast
As I watched the blockbuster bio-thriller Contagion, I was struck by how realistic it was in many ways. That isn't surprising, since many epidemiologists, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, served as advisors. The film was based on a simple premise. What if a new, deadly virus that kills one out of four people it infects were also easily transmissible from human to human?
I knew more about the subject than most people in the audience, because I spent five years researching and writing Inside the Outbreaks, a history…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2011http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/cost-vaccine-refusal/
Before I get to the cost of a measles outbreak, I think Seth Mnookin sets the appropriate frame of reference:
I don't know anyone in the world who likes needles or likes watching needles pierce their child's skin. However, the fact that something is scary does not convey a license to blithely deny reality -- which is why I find the actions of parents who have simply decided for themselves that vaccines and dangerous and at the same refuse to acknowledge the potential repercussions of not vaccinating on those around them to be…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2011In looking through the comments of Chris Mooney's recent post on vaccination denialism, I found this comment, which inevitably shows up in one form or another (italics mine; errors original):
i grew up in the 1960s when less than a half dozen vaccines were required for infant protection spread out over the first few years of life. outside of a rubella outbreak, i recall no advrese effects on our infant populace, neither in mortality, serious disease contraction, nor mental disfunction.
today there are well over 2 dozem vaccines required, sometimes given 6-8 at one time, spread out over 18…
tsmith | April 29, 2011Maryn McKenna has an excellent post on 2008's measles outbreak in Arizona. 14 confirmed patients, 8,321 individuals tracked down, 15,120 work hours lost at 7 Arizona hospitals due to furloughs of staff who were not appropriately vaccinated, and almost $800,000 spent by 2 hospitals just to contain the disease--and it all could have been prevented.
tsmith | April 25, 2011The Times Square Jumbotron ad keeps trucking, and with it frustration from the medical and public health community. The American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to CBS Outdoors, asking them to pull the ad, to no avail. Rahul Parikh thinks it's time to do more:
We in medicine need more than letters and passive education for parents on a website. What we really need are some Mad Men of our own. If you want guidance, look at what the folks at the the American Legacy Foundation have done with their anti-smoking campaign, The Truth. Who can forget the TV commercial where a truck pulls up to…
mikethemadbiologist | April 21, 2011When I read this otherwise excellent article by Chris Mooney about why scientific evidence often doesn't persuade people*, I had the exact same reaction Kevin Drum did:
But be prepared to be annoyed when Chris wrenches his spine out of shape bending over backward to find an example of liberals denying science as much as conservatives. It might be true that you can find vaccine deniers in the aisles of Whole Foods, but if there's any rigorous evidence that belief in the vaccine-autism link is especially pronounced or widespread among liberals, I haven't seen it. Surely there's a better, more…
tsmith | March 28, 2011There has been a surge of interest recently in science denial, particularly revolving around the issue of vaccines. Last year saw the release of Michael Specter's Denialism; in the last few months, three others have been released: Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus, Robert Goldberg's Tabloid Medicine, and Paul Offit's "Deadly Choices." More about each of them after the jump.
"The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin focuses on the general topic of media-fueled science denial, using vaccines as the case study. Like Offit's recent "Autism's False Prophets, Mnookin details a bit of the history of the anti-…