Small Pox, Mumps and Measles Oh My!

Factual Questions
1

I have heard it said that Small Pox only exists in a few labs, worldwide. Other than those live cultures it is extinct. No one anywhere can catch it because of the large scale vaccinations done in every country.

Polio, as far as I can remember is virtually the same, although there are a few reported cases a decade I believe.

Why are Chicken pox, Mumps, Measles, and probably many others I don’t know about still around and going strong?

While I understand they are having an upswing because of people who won’t vaccinate their children, the vaccinations were held in schools back in the 60’s and 70’s and I don’t think there was any way to stop your child from being vaccinated. I still remember the little pitted scar left from the machine that I got mine from, but I also remember my bout of Chicken Pox pretty well. I never had the Mumps or the Measles.

So why weren’t these others kicked down like Small Pox?

2

You can clear a disease out of a given area but unless you maintain strict control over travel into that area, all it takes is one or two unknowing vectors to re-introduce the disease. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole, except the moles move super fast, your mallet is slow and unwieldy and instead of getting a low score for missing moles, people die.

3

My understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that smallpox is an unusually easy disease to eradicate because there are no non-expressing carriers and no animal reservoir. I believe I read that in a National Geographic but it could have been somewhere else.

4

Also, there have been huge, very well-organized, and all encompassing campaigns to vaccinate against smallpox and polio. So, it’s not too surprising that they’ve been effective and those diseases wiped out (or nearly so). On the other hand, no such campaigns took place for mumps, measles, and chicken pox. (But even the less intense vaccination campaigns against those infections have led to marked reductions in their incidence).

5

As I understand it even the small pox stocks in the labs have been destroyed to eliminate the possibility of accidental escape. I forget who, I think the Kiwanas had organized a campaign to eliminate it, and it is gone.

Wiping a major disease takes a enormous effort and is expensive. Maybe mumps and measles day will come too. No Bill Gates fan here, but he is using some of what I regard as ill gotten gains to finance major vaccination programs. Maybe he will whittle them down for the kill. Go Bill, go.

6

That isn’t correct. Because it has been eradicated, smallpox vaccinations are no longer routinely given. The majority of the population is susceptible, which is why smallpox shows up as a possible bioterrorism concern.

7

Which is to say that you’re both correct and incorrect. True, we don’t see smallpox in the wild anymore. That’s not because we’re all immune - in fact, we’re not. I’m 37, and neither myself nor most of my agemates or anyone younger than I is immune if we live in the US. Vaccinations for smallpox stopped in the 70’s. We have no more immunity to smallpox than the Native Americans did when Europeans first brought it here.

The reason we don’t have smallpox is because the generation BEFORE us was successfully vaccinated en masse. And **Zsofia **is right - animals don’t get, carry or transmit smallpox, so there were no smallpox viruses hiding out in birds or pigs or monkeys or anything else. That left the only living smallpox viruses in laboratories. As long as they stay there, no one will get smallpox (unless there’s another random mutation of the cowpox virus, but that’s not a huge risk.) So no one can catch it now…but if some of the virus is stolen and turned into a weapon, we’re screwed. At least until we can whip up some new vaccine doses.

Other reasons smallpox was comparatively easy to eradicate:

Smallpox has a low transmission rate. It’s actually pretty hard to catch smallpox from someone. Rather, it used to be hard to catch. There’s some evidence that it would be easier to catch it today with modern buildings and HVAC systems. But that wasn’t so much the case when smallpox was at its worst.

Smallpox isn’t communicable while it’s incubating. You’re not contagious until you have symptoms, by which time people can avoid you like…well…you know…

Smallpox was easy to diagnose. Nothing else looks quite like it. So those who had it were quickly quarantined away from other people, and those who didn’t have it but lived near a victim could be vaccinated.

Smallpox also had only one strain. There were not different smallpox viruses with different mutations, like there are for the flu virus. This means that the one single vaccine worked to prevent ALL smallpox, not just some of them.

Smallpox had no latent phase. That is, you got it, you got sick, you either died or got better. If you died (about 30% mortality rate), you’d no longer spread it. If you got better, you no longer spread it. Compare this to, say, hepatitis, where you can walk around for years not knowing you have it but spreading it to others.

Smallpox was that perfect storm of a virus that was ideal for vaccine based elimination. That it happened to be the first vaccine was actually a bit unfortunate in some ways, as it set pretty unreasonable expectations for vaccination thereafter.

8

Polio is likely to be the second human* disease to be eradicated from the earth sometime in the near future, if all goes well.

But, yeah, there are reasons why it’s tougher to do it with other diseases. WhyNot gave a good list.
*There was a cow disease that was recently declared eradicated, making it the second overall disease.

9

Polio makes a reappearance not only because people have refused the vaccine, but because the oral vaccine is LIVE vaccine. While the body is building up immunity following a dose of Oral Polio, the virus is being shedded in waste.

People have “caught” polio from changing a baby’s diaper.

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (German Measles) have not been eliminated because there is no worldwide effort to vaccinate. This leaves sources for the diseases outside of the US. With air travel, anyone can be exposed at any time.

The reason why there haven’t been any horrendous outbreaks of MMR within the US is because MOST people have been vaccinated. The ones who have remained disease free while being unvaccinated are coasting on a free ride that has been provided by the ones who get their proper inoculations.

Get your shots. Make sure your kids get all your shots. Don’t take chances.
~VOW

10

We haven’t used OPV (oral Polio vaccine) in the US since 2000 for just this reason, and for a dozen years before that, you had to look hard for it, 'cause nearly everyone had switched to IPV.

ETA: OPV is still used elsewhere in the world, though, 'cause it’s cheap and easy to administer. You don’t have to worry about having clean needles and syringes and alcohol wipes and Sharps containers.

11

Thanks, WhyNot, for that bit of news!

I confess, my kids are in their twenties, so all I was familiar with was the OPV. Of course, I remember getting the shots when I was a kid, and I also remember receiving the OPV on sugar cubes.

I know people with Post Polio Syndrome, and I am a fervent believer in getting ALL vaccines!
~VOW

12

Rinderpest? (pretty sure I read that, but am too lazy to find a cite)

13

So Smallpox was a bad deadly disease but it wasn’t really very tough, and it wasn’t adaptable so when the axe fell, it went fairly quick.

I don’t know a lot about these things, I do know flu virus is very adaptable, and mutates quickly. Mumps and measles have other vectors beside human? Correct me if I am wrong but I was also under the impression that cowpox, smallpox, chickenpox, and big-pox were all related??

14

Straightdope megathread on elimination of rinderpest

15

I just want to caution anyone out there who might think that measles (not German measles) is not a bad disease. That stuff hurts- I don’t know if my childhood vaccinations were duds or maybe my parents didn’t keep up with them as required, but I had the measles my sophomore year in high school. I felt like death warmed over for a solid week- fever, achy, vomiting. A friend of mine had measles in college- he spent a week in the hospital there because of it.

Measles is a disease you do not want.

16

I’m pretty sure that probably the only people who MIGHT think that measles are not a bad disease are people who are anti-vaccine. Most people know that measles (and mumps, and rubella, and chicken pox) are not to be taken lightly. Sorry for your experience!

17

I went through both measles and mumps as a child in the 50’s. The casual attitude may stem from many like me that had an easy time of them. I think it was the measles my close friend and I both were off school at the same time. Perhaps to save our mothers’ sanity, on her way in town, my mother dropped me off leaving me at least 1/4 mile walk to his house. We had a good time together, a break from the tedium of being housebound. Daytime TV in the 50’s was dismal.

I harp on not generalizing from too few cases. That I had mild cases of the whole bunch doesn’t mean they aren’t serious diseases, especially once you are a little older. I never questioned having my kids vaccinated for them.

18

Oh, GAWD, when I was a kid, you got sent over to the house of sick friends in hopes that you’d catch measles/mumps/chicken pox.

Those used to be abbreviated in health records as “UCHD.” Usual Childhood Diseases. Like thelabdude, I’m the last of a dying breed. I caught 'em all: measles, mumps, chicken pox, German measles, and roseola.

“Regular” measles were the BIG measles. You were sick for at least a week, and you were SICK. Old wives’ tales said you had to be kept into a darkened room, with NO TV. German measles were the three-day measles. You were sick before the rash popped out. The rash lasted for three days, and itched like crazy.

Complications from those diseases are rare, but why suffer at all? Get vaccinated!
~VOW

19

When I was in middle school, this would have been in the neighborhood of 1988, a kid at my school came down with measles so the county came in (as in, at the school but your parents brought you, this wasn’t the “line up for your shots, class” style vaccination which I never saw IRL) with shots for all. Apparently we had all gotten our measles shots at 12 months and sometime after that they found out that they took better if they were given a few months later, or something, so boosters it was.

I never had chicken pox, and God knows I was exposed enough. I suppose I ought to get vaccinated for that just to be safe. Though I wonder if I shouldn’t find out if I somehow acquired immunity first, I’ve always been curious…which I’m sure would cost more than a shot.

But other than that, I was vaccinated against all the big ones, with smallpox being the biggest exception as that’d been discontinued a few years prior to my arrival, and of course there’s some more of them they give now that I’d have gotten back then if they’d existed.

20

I’ve never had the chicken pox. I discussed it with my doctor. He suggested that I have the first shot of the series (of two, if I remember right), and based on the reaction of my body, we’d determine if I should get the second shot.

I don’t recall the details any more, but I remember he decided that I should have the other shot…so I did.

-D/a