That would be the hard measles tho, right? Since there wasn’t a vaccine for the soft measles when we were young.
I’m not sure which one you mean is “hard” or “soft” but the combined vaccine was available in the late 60s and was widespread in the US by the early 70s.
I haven’t been paying enough attention to note ages, but I suppose it’s possible you were in that 4-5 year window when only the regular measles vaccine was available and not the combined-with-rubella-and-mumps vaccine.
Still depends on what you mean by “big deal”. Rubella (if that’s what you mean by “soft”) is a more serious disease for adults and it came be a significant problem for the unborn if contracted by women in early pregnancy, potentially leading to death, deafness, blindness, or mental impairment of the children. It doesn’t happen to all of them and it’s not a lot of people in the grand scheme but a fucking travesty because it’s mostly avoidable.
ETA: I guess the point is: odds are it’s not a big deal for you or the majority who don’t suffer permanent complications (except for smallpox or polio, which really are horrible no matter what). But for the few who do suffer permanent complications, it’s horrible. Also, it’s insulting that people dismiss their suffering because it’s such a small minority affected.
I’ve decided not to put a seat belt on my kid in the car. I’m trying to develop his natural resistance to windshields.
It was to my maternal great-grandmother, a big deal that is. She was pregnant and caught the measles. She had twins, but lost one the day after birth because of complications caused by the disease. The other had a rough time, but did survive.
A lot of us older folks have stories like that (my grandparents almost buried one child because of whooping cough). I don’t know if young adults have enough stories like that to have a good idea of what life before vaccines was like.
I’ve got a pretty good guess about her age; it’s close to mine. When we were very young, we got our DPT shots & boosters. Then the very messy smallpox vaccinations & boosters. Mumps, chicken pox & both kinds of measles were just regular childhood diseases–because there were no vaccines. No, our parents* didn’t rush about telling us we could die when we were sick; they took time off from work, fed us chicken soup & apple juice & watched carefully for complications. Since I read everything in the house, I think Doctor Spock had hipped me to some of the dangers; not that I was scared–but being sick was never fun. Remember, those were the days when you had one TV in the house–not in the sickroom! I even remember a darkened room for the measles; reading was bad for the eyes…
I vividly remember being bussed to a local school, the summer when polio vaccine became available. We all lined up for shots. I never reproduced but gladly line up for my free flu shot at work every year.
- I was raised by my widowed mother and grandmother; they both worked.
News from Wales: Children and young adults are still lining up for their MMR shots. A 25 year old man with measles has died; they aren’t sure yet if he died from the disease…
It’s sort of like a nuclear chain reaction. Vaccination does not need to produce 100% immunity no matter what - all it needs to do is reduce the rate of transmission from a supercritical rate (i.e. on average each carrier infects more than one new carrier) to a subcritical rate (i.e. on average each carrier infects less than one new carrier). If you do this you don’t need 100% immunity, because the disease can’t spread very far before succumbing to attrition.
I did some googling based on the constant (and confusing) use in this thread:
Hard measles is measles/rubeola.
Soft measles is german measles/rubella.
Yeah, given that he hasn’t been back for Steps 3 and 4 it’s certainly possible I overreacted.
Still, asking questions is one thing. Claiming to have “read a lot”, then asking questions that are easily answered/commonly debunked is generally a lead-in to the “let’s go round-and-round-and-round until you get tired” approach*.
Which I personally consider to be a form a trolling (although I suspect the mods don’t agree with my definition).
If I understand what you mean, I mean the kind of measles for which a vaccine came out in 1963. But I think you are correct - a vaccine against rubeola (German measles, if that is what is meant by “soft measles” - despite the name, the two diseases are not related) did not come out until the late 1960s. And rubeola is not that big a deal in children, you are also correct there, but it is very serious if a woman contracts the disease while pregnant, because it can cause serious birth defects.
Nowadays children get the MMR vaccine - Measles/Mumps/Rubella. Part of the idea is to eliminate rubella in childhood so that no pregnant woman is at risk for coming into contact with an infected child and having birth defects.
Regards,
Shodan
We need a “like” button.
Thanks (and thanks to Czarcasm too). I knew about herd immunity, but blanked on the idea that there are herd members that can’t get immunized (for reasons other than stupidity). The <full immunity adds to that–it means that there are some unfortunate people out there contracting the disease despite being vaccinated.
But since people are getting the disease despite getting vaccinated, doesn’t that prove that vaccines are ineffective and that therefore, even if there’s no so-called ‘scientific’ link they’re not worth the risk to … to …
fuck, my computer just exploded.
Anti-vaccers are like climate deniers. I do a lot of climate policy work (most adaptation now, because I’ve given up believing that the world can pull its head out of its ass long enough to achieve any meaningful mitigation), and I hate having to be absurdly careful with public-facing statements. Yes, there are open questions about climate science, no shit. Questioning certain things does not mean you can take my statements out of context and use the to prove things that are far outside the scope of the quote, and no questioning certain aspects of the science does not mean I’m either question everything or am setting up some kind of assault on logic and reason. Fuck me, sometimes I think I want to work in evolutionary biology because no one ever questions those guys. No, wait…
Don’t forget that Wakefield was working on his own measles vaccine and it was in his financial interest to see the existing one cast in a bad light.
He only turned anti-vaccine when he figured he could make more money duping the ignorant.
It’s the kind of thing that’s fun to point out when anti-vaxers cry “follow the money” when having hysterics about ‘big pharma’
I know a woman with two daughters. Her older daughter is about the same age as mine and played together several times when they were small and before she got pregnant the second time. During this time, she shared her theory with me that our immune systems need to be challenged by exposure to the germs and diseases out there, and if they are insufficiently challenged, they will turn on themselves and you see more allergic reactions and such. Needless to say, she put her theory into practice by not having her daughter immunized.
She moved away for a couple of years and when she came back, I heard through a mutual friend that her older daughter, who wasn’t being treated by a pediatrician because her mother couldn’t find one who would accept her as a patient until she had her vaccinations, had had several serious but undiagnosed illnesses. For example, she had a miserable time due to what very much seemed to be the whooping cough, and she had a red rash over her whole body once. Measles? Maybe, but without a doctor checking her out, who can say?
Anyway, what I heard is that she did end up getting her second daughter vaccinated because, and there aren’t enough :smack: smilies in the world for this, she just couldn’t go through all that hassle a second time. Sucks to be her older daughter, I guess.
The kicker to all this? This woman is a pharmacist.
Nitpick:
Rubeola = measles
Rubella = German measles
To be fair, this is probably true to some extent. But to decide that immunizations don’t count as challenging the immune system is idiotic. That’s exactly what they do!
The oldest brother of my middle daughter’s best friend is a very low functioning autistic. He’s very handsome from a distance, but from about ten feet in his blank look is a dead giveaway. He is permanently institutionalized.
After that exposure I wondered whether my granddaughter would be vaccinated.
I asked her if she had thought about not getting her daughter the usual childhood vaccinations and she gave me a look like- “Are you kidding?” My grandkid has had all her shots.
Of course my daughter was a biology major at Chicago. I guess that science education paid off.
Yay for pediatricians! Also, I’ve heard that children are exposed to literally hundreds of antigens a day - the dozen or so that they get in vaccinations are a drop in a bucket.
Hmm, so this is the latest thought on it? I received the vaccine as a teenager, having never had it before, and it’s been a lot longer than ten years. Should I get a booster?
One thing this puts into mind is that children’s book about how wonderful getting measles is. Ugh.
The Wikipedia for chickenpox vaccine says this:
Surely your doctor knows. I got chickenpox the old fashioned way so I just took the discussion at face value and never did any follow-up. First few Google results say the usual administration is one shot at 12-15 months and another at 4-6 years. Maybe that is what they meant.