# US Measles Cases Hit Twenty Year High **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [May 30, 2014, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610 "2014-05-30T01:28:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![LavenderBlue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e95f7d/32.png) [@LavenderBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LavenderBlue)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/1 "2014-05-30T01:28:29Z")
The CDC made a special announcement today to point this out. Thanks a lot, you dumb fuck anti-vaxxers. > [@](#): > > [Measles Cases in U.S. at a Twenty Year Record High - Shot of Prevention](http://shotofprevention.com/2014/05/29/measles-cases-in-u-s-at-a-twenty-year-record-high/) > > In a special briefing held by the CDC this afternoon, it was announced that the U.S. is experiencing a 20 year record high number of measles cases. Damn it. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/2 "2014-05-30T01:38:09Z")
In related news, small groups of anti-vaxxers have been spotted near local schools. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/3 "2014-05-30T02:23:15Z")
> [@running\_coach](#): > > In related news, small groups of anti-vaxxers have been spotted near local schools. I laughed. ---
**Author:** ![Locrian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/locrian/32/14146_2.png) [@Locrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Locrian)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 7:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/4 "2014-05-30T07:12:33Z")
I’m still waiting for the day when a school or playground is infected and a bunch of infants contract measles and they trace the illness to some dumb antivaxxer, who has signed copies of dumb bitch Hasslebeck’s books, and she’s charged with lots of manslaughter, or hoping the kids survive, lots of counts of endangering the public. News stations and publishers simy have to learn the lesson: an asshat with a cockshit opinion is NOT NEWS, or something to publish, it’s something to make fun of, at best. ---
**Author:** ![Doctor\_Why\_Bother](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e19adc/32.png) [@Doctor\_Why\_Bother](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doctor_Why_Bother)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/5 "2014-05-30T08:02:55Z")
Don’t blame the anti-vaxxers (well…okay, blame them a bit). Your real anger should be reserved for the stupid, pig-ignorant, thoroughly complicit dumbshit media that (a) has no fucking idea how to report science, (b) lazily frames the issue as a debate between two roughly equal sides when it is actually the exact opposite (to paraphrase John Oliver "The only way to report that, say, 10% of parents don’t believe in vaccination is to say ‘10% of parents are wrong’), and © is nowhere near critical enough of bad science, bad logic, and stuck-up, spoilt, over-privileged mommy warriors, food worshippers, crunchy granola nutcases or any other breed of anti-science cunt who thinks that earning a Ph.D and pissing around on Google for a few days are the same fucking thing. In a perfect world anti-vaxxers wouldn’t even be allowed on TV unless they literally had supportive peer-reviewed studies actually in their hands when they got to the studio. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and so media fuckwits will keep giving these cretins the oxygen of publicity. Thanks to them, this problem will likely get worse before it gets better. ---
**Author:** ![Locrian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/locrian/32/14146_2.png) [@Locrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Locrian)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/6 "2014-05-30T09:38:16Z")
That’s the thing, **Doctor**. I agree with most of what you said. And yes, the media doesn’t interview every batshit insane church about vaccinations, [but this bullshit already started and was still spread in August last year.](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/23/texas-measles-outbreak/2693945/) > [@](#): > > Eagle Mountain is led by pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons, the daughter of televangelist Kenneth Copeland. Church leaders wouldn’t grant interviews, but Pearsons released a statement after the outbreak saying she isn’t anti-vaccine. But Pearsons added that she still has some reservations about vaccines. > > “The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time,” she said. > > Pearsons set up vaccination clinics on church property, but at the same time, when she preaches to her congregates, the message is for them to put their faith in God. > > “So I’m going to tell you what the facts are, and the facts are the facts, but then we know the truth. That always overcomes facts,” she has said. Take children away from her reach, her care, and her “church”. Make an honest media item showing that this is entirely the wrong way to care for a child. I’m sure the Schiable family in Pennsylvania might agree with this bitch’s religious tactic, but it should be shown that any church statement concerning health care will be entirely wrong, and never showing the right path to a long life. Faith over common sense will never prevail. The media story on this whackjob and her supposed church should have a headline, “Listening to a Dimwit at the Pulpit, and How It Will Kill Your Kid.” Then there’s the media schmos who shows Hasslebeck & Jenny Shitwad over and over selling uneducated malarky not for religious reasons, but just for “oh, my god, the government has a plot against us” reasons. They’re out to get us, them elected awficials! Oh, I better call my rich husband!!! 😃 So yes, I’m disappointed in the media role in this who constantly give us these dimwitted dumbfuck opinions only to light up their message boards, their ratings. Make a law-- vaccination, or we take your kids, period. Hey, prayer will bring 'em back. Right? Just like prayer will cure the measles, along with an “honest” donation. ---
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/7 "2014-05-30T10:47:24Z")
I actually had an old friend block me from facebook because I kind of exploded on her over this. She posted some insane anti-vax bullshit to my wall based on a Tomljenovic paper that’s been long since discredited, and given that this wasn’t the first time I gave her the full broadside. No actual insults beyond making it very clear that she was wrong, did not understand the science, and should stop spreading dangerous and destructive misinformation. She took specific offense to me calling her “destructive”. Well jeez, hun, what would _you_ call it if someone constantly and consistently posted misinformation that hurts people, and the result of that misinformation was a massive increase in potentially life-threatening diseases? :mad: Fuck anti-vaxxers. When your rank _stupidity_ puts others at risk, you have _no excuse_ and you deserve every insult thrown at you. You are the worst kind of science denialist. ---
**Author:** ![Moonlitherial](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4bbf92/32.png) [@Moonlitherial](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonlitherial)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/8 "2014-05-30T13:08:00Z")
Have you seen the latest entry? [Peta](http://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/petas-worst-campaign-ever-sa.html) now says milk causes autism. ---
**Author:** ![corvidae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/898d66/32.png) [@corvidae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/corvidae)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/9 "2014-05-30T14:21:31Z")
> [@Moonlitherial](#): > > Have you seen the latest entry? [Peta](http://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/petas-worst-campaign-ever-sa.html) now says milk causes autism. There must be a lot of autistic cows out there. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/10 "2014-05-30T16:18:55Z")
> [@corvidae](#): > > There must be a lot of autistic cows out there. All the cows I know have problems socializing and conversing normally with people. ---
**Author:** ![Kimballkid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b5a626/32.png) [@Kimballkid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimballkid)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/11 "2014-05-30T16:31:31Z")
Maybe we should start a mooovement. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/12 "2014-05-30T16:40:57Z")
> [@Moonlitherial](#): > > Have you seen the latest entry? [Peta](http://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/petas-worst-campaign-ever-sa.html) now says milk causes autism. If there is a study behind this, I’m sure someone has made a correlation/causation error. I worked with autistic people, and some of them will eat only a limited repertoire of foods, others will eat only unadorned foods (eg, a person might eat unadorned spaghetti, and mozzarella cheese sticks at the same meal, but not spaghetti with cheese on it). Milk is one food that is nutritious, and a lot of autistic people will accept. Some parents give autistic children Ensure or Carnation Instant Breakfast, to make sure they get enough vitamins, and some children end up drinking a lot of this. A few autistic children have issue with textures, or with noisy food (crunchy food), but no issues with milk, and milk has complete protein, and lots of the calcium kids need. So, a survey of what autistic kids eat will probably find that they drink more milk than non-autistic kids, on the whole. But some drink no milk at all, because an autistic kid has the same chance as anyone of being lactose intolerant. Plus, a few parents withhold milk (and all dairy products), because they follow a discredited diet based on Andrew Wakefield’s work. There’s also a very rare condition where a dairy allergy can produce some autistic-like behaviors, so some parents withhold milk in the hope that their children have this. If their children did, recovery would be swift and dramatic, and it never is, but many parents fool themselves into thinking their children are doing just a little better, and keep milk out of their diets. The dairy-autism link has been kicked around for almost 20 years, and been pretty well discredited. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/13 "2014-05-30T16:46:26Z")
Oh, BTW, I hope Jenny McCarthy is patting herself on the back for this. As far as the religious types go, people have been trying to pray away diseases for millennia. I can show them lots of graves, and pictures of kids in iron lungs and body braces, that demonstrate how effective prayer has been. There was a huge, organized prayer movement during the Black Death, and history tells us it didn’t do much good. Yersinia pestis quakes in the presence of penicillin, though. ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/14 "2014-05-30T16:57:06Z")
> [@Doctor\_Why\_Bother](#): > > Don’t blame the anti-vaxxers (well…okay, blame them a bit). Your real anger should be reserved for the stupid, pig-ignorant, thoroughly complicit dumbshit media that (a) has no fucking idea how to report science, (b) lazily frames the issue as a debate between two roughly equal sides when it is actually the exact opposite (to paraphrase John Oliver "The only way to report that, say, 10% of parents don’t believe in vaccination is to say ‘10% of parents are wrong’), and (c) is nowhere near critical enough of bad science, bad logic, and stuck-up, spoilt, over-privileged mommy warriors, food worshippers, crunchy granola nutcases or any other breed of anti-science cunt who thinks that earning a Ph.D and pissing around on Google for a few days are the same fucking thing. > > In a perfect world anti-vaxxers wouldn’t even be allowed on TV unless they literally had supportive peer-reviewed studies actually in their hands when they got to the studio. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and so media fuckwits will keep giving these cretins the oxygen of publicity. Thanks to them, this problem will likely get worse before it gets better. Yeah, there’s that. But parents have a responsibility to make the right decisions for their kids regardless of how irresponsible the media is. To put it another way, it would be a bit much for an anti-vax parent to blame their stupidity and inability to look after their kids on the media. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/15 "2014-05-30T17:15:07Z")
That’s a good point. People who ignore what their doctors say, because Jenny McCarthy said something different-- or even Senator So-&-So, who is not a doctor, said so, is an idiot. Getting a second opinion wouldn’t be stupid, but a second doctor should say the same thing as the first in this particular case. If the “doctor” is a chiropractor, naturopath, homeopath, reiki master, or the sales guy at Whole Foods, the parent is still an idiot. ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/16 "2014-05-30T17:46:57Z")
> [@Kimballkid](#): > > Maybe we should start a mooovement. That’s an udderly ridiculous idea. ---
**Author:** ![PunditLisa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/4af34b/32.png) [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/17 "2014-05-30T18:30:26Z")
> [@Green\_Bean](#): > > That’s an udderly ridiculous idea. Easy to say when you have no steak in the matter. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/18 "2014-05-30T18:34:37Z")
> [@Kimballkid](#): > > Maybe we should start a mooovement. That’s all we need. A cow evil genius directing her mignons. _flees_ ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/19 "2014-05-30T18:41:39Z")
Just a random aside- I’m involved in the UK circus scene, which means I have a lot of hippy friends. A while back, someone posted a throwaway antivacc comment on a mutual friend’s Facebook page. After all, she’s a vegan who lives in a van and makes a living teaching circus skills. What she didn’t know, however, is that said mutual friend may be a hippy vegan who lives in a van, and she may make a living teaching circus skills, but she also has a PhD in immunology, as do several of her old uni friends who are also on her Facebook friends list. Truly, the takedown was a thing of beauty 😃 Not all crunchy hippies have no brain. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2014, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610/20 "2014-05-30T18:43:16Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > If there is a study behind this, I’m sure someone has made a correlation/causation error. I checked out the PETA site, and their evidence is a couple of papers that show that reducing milk consumption seems to help alleviate the symptoms of autism in some cases. Getting from this to a claim that milk causes autism, is like suggesting that healthy people should walk with crutches to prevent sprained ankles. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-measles-cases-hit-twenty-year-high/689610.md?page=2)