Hey, there! Log in / Register

Two more measles cases found; city schedules free vaccination clinic Friday

The Boston Health Commission reports a woman who ate in a restaurant in the same building as the French consulate has been diagnosed with measles, as has a woman who lives near the consulate employee who sparked an emergency city response when she was diagnosed.

The 24-year-old unvaccinated woman with the initial case is recovering and no longer considered contagious, the commission says.

The commission will be providing free shots between noon and 5 p.m. at the Park Square Building, 31 St. James Ave., where the consulate is located.

Measles is an airborne virus that is spread person to person through the air. Symptoms usually begin 10 to 12 days after exposure to a person with measles, but can be delayed for as long as 18 days. Early symptoms include a high fever, runny nose, cough, and red, watery eyes. A skin rash usually occurs two to four days later and begins on the face but soon spreads to other parts of the body, the department says.


Ad:


Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!

Comments

This is why we can't have nice things: you fucktards who think that getting an MMR shot will give your baby autism.

Have the French explained why she wasn't vaccinated?

up
Voting closed 0

Vaccines CAN cause autism. So can encephalopathy from measles. And measles is more likely to do it.

Autism is a behavioral diagnosis given to people who show a set of symptoms; it doesn't have any one cause. Most people who have it have it because of genetic causes, but it can also be caused by brain damage.

I've worked with people whose families have been compensated by the vaccine injury fund and whose presentation after the injury very much meets the criteria for autism. Many laypeople who have met such families have stopped believing "vaccines don't ever cause autism" and have stopped getting their kids vaccinated.

Harm is being caused by the anti-vax nutjobs, yes, but it's also being caused by the people who say "vaccines don't ever cause autism/any sort of acquired disability," because that just isn't true, and a lot of people discount the entire medical profession once they meet one of the rare people who did develop autism (or, more often, paralysis) after a vaccine reaction. We need to be telling people that vaccine-caused disabilities are very rare but do happen, and disease-caused disability is more common.

up
Voting closed 0

See below.

up
Voting closed 0

Jenny McCarthy has just as much blood on her hands when it comes to the subject of vaccines. Hell, if I'd had any kids, I'd rather have them vaccinated than to risk having them develop a potentially permanently-crippling, or killing disease. I don't know who the h*ll gave these people the license to practice, given the fact that they've whipped up so much hysteria and endangered the public, but they should both have their licenses pulled for acting in such a criminally irresponsible manner.

up
Voting closed 0

Some of the stuff Jenny McCarthy recommends has been pretty much disproven by science and other stuff doesn't have sufficient research. Of course, her son also received all the standard treatments that are backed by research, so her book hardly proves that the DAN stuff was effective since it was done alongside standard treatments.

I think though we need to remember that every treatment was once newfangled and not backed by research. And that people have different biochemistry and some things might help some people but not others (vitamins, etc.) The stuff like chelation though, has been proven to be pretty dangerous. But when professionals, physicians in particular, lump all newish/nonwestern treatments together and say that it's all bullshit, and then a parent finds research or personal experience showing that a non-mainstream method is effective, then once again you get people dismissing healthcare professionals all together and thinking we're a bunch of liars who have an agenda in steering them away from certain treatments. We really need to be informed ourselves and let them know which treatments are proven to be dangerous, which ones lack enough research at this time, and which ones are likely ineffective but harmless if they want to try them. If we just say outright that nothing new or underresearched could possibly be effective, we're no better than the newagey nutjobs who say that professionals are all a crock.

up
Voting closed 0

The only supposed "research" to ever claim otherwise has been discredited - the author was shown to have changed data to fit his hypothesis. His medical license was revoked and the journal which originally published it issued an apology and a retraction.

No matter how much people (sometimes even people on juries) want it to - correlation does not equal causation. Just because there have been cases where a parent first noticed a child's autistism shortly after they recieved a vaccine, does not prove in any way that the vaccine was the cause of the condition. People have also realized that their child is autisic when that child screamed for ten minutes after having a day-care worker place a hand on the child's shoulder. That does not mean shoulder-touching caused that child to become autisic.

We humans are very good at pattern-finding, so it's easy for us to succumb to these fallacies over and over. When people experience a threat or a trauma - like the trauma of realizing that a loved one is suffering from a serious disability - their brains go to work overtime trying to identify any possibile causes. This is perfectly understandable - and usually very useful. For instance, it works great when you're trying to figure out why all the monkeys and birds in the trees are going nuts (hint - it's the tiger hiding in the bushes over there). But when the threat is a subtle and not-well-understood illness, it's very easy to find some notable event and assume a casual connection (hint - you didn't get sick because that witchy old woman gave you the stink-eye yesterday).

We may not understand the root causes of autism, but now that we've figured out how to do sophisticated statistical analyses we can make very definitive statements about what doesn't cause it. Loud noises do not cause autism. Having a mother who is not emotionally demonstrable, or who was scared by an animal during pregnancy, does not cause autism. Vaccines do not cause autism.

Not getting vaccines does lead to people dying. Millions and millions every year.

up
Voting closed 0

No, I know it doesn't cause autism the way the nutjobs think it does, and we know that autism is almost always caused by genetic differences.

What I was pointing out is that there are a tiny number of cases where a child has a reaction to a vaccine, develops encephalopathy, then when all has calmed down and the child is stable after the brain injury, the best diagnosis for the child's disability is autism. When I evaluate a child, I'm looking at behavioral patterns regardless of cause. If I have information that the child was very different before an illness or injury, I'll note that, but if the behaviors and learning style are consistent with autism, the correct diagnosis for me to give is still autism, even if caused by a brain injury rather than genetics.

There are rare cases of children reacting to vaccines, then meeting the criteria for autism after they've had a massive brain injury from the vaccine. The data for vaccine injury compensation shows this. It does a disservice when we tell families that vaccines never ever cause autism, because that's just not true. It isn't a reason by itself to not vaccinate, but it has indeed happened in a few cases, so we shouldn't lie to families and say "never."

up
Voting closed 0

There are rare cases of me not being annoyed by assholes, but they're one thing, and one thing only. Rare.

If Joe fucken Scarborough can reverse his position on the vaccine-Autism connection (and he has a child with ... yup, Autism!!!! that he was convinced for years was caused by a vaccine), then why don't you kindly take a deep knee bend and stop spreading this propoganda.

Neural deficiencies are an extremely complex area of science, and the cause-effect factor of vaccines are still not as conclusively verified as you're claiming in this thread.

/coughs, nutter, coughs

up
Voting closed 0

for some people. I only know this because I read a story in the paper the other day about the Supreme Court throwing out a parent lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company, with the majority ruling that civil lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers were prohibited by an act of congress which had set up a separate court of some kind for these types of claims. Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg dissented, I believe. But as you say, such things are undoutedly quite rare.

up
Voting closed 0

Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Which makes sense, because these things are so rare that it's good to have them being evaluated by the team that sees the few cases per year, rather than juries that know nothing and are only presented with a family's sad story.

Still, the existence of a program is acknowledgment that vaccines do at times harm people. Yes, it's rare, but it isn't "never," or they wouldn't need a program.

up
Voting closed 0

... vaccine preventable diseases cause a whole hell of a lot more brain damage, deafness, blindness, palsy ... and death than extreme adverse vaccination reactions.

Not vaccinating yourself or your kid because you fear these reactions is like buying lottery tickets instead of putting money toward college on the assumption that winning megabucks will make your kid rich in the future.

/epidemology rant

up
Voting closed 0

Not vaccinating yourself or your kid because you fear these reactions is like buying lottery tickets instead of putting money toward college on the assumption that winning megabucks will make your kid rich in the future.

It's like playing Russian Roulette.

Brava, SwirlyGrrl!!

up
Voting closed 0

The special vaccine court was set up as a way to protect the pharma companies from endless and expensive court proceedings in order to assure the continued avilablilty of existing vaccines and development of new vaccines. It is an acknowledgment of lawsuits, not expectation of harm done by vaccines. Do vaccines on rare occasions cause bad outcomes? The happy result may be (I don't know this off-hand) a court more experienced at looking at the science in question, but the intended beneficiaries are those who will be kept safe by vaccines, not the veryveryvery small number who may unfortunately be injured by them.

up
Voting closed 0

Yeah, courts don't get clogged up with people who think they were injured by a vaccine and weren't, these things don't get decided by juries with no experience, and the few people who actually were injured have an avenue of getting reviewed and compensated by people who know what they're doing.

If there were no acknowledgment of harm by vaccines, there wouldn't be payouts.

up
Voting closed 0

that the vaccines caused the reactions that led to severe illness and subsequent brain damage shortly after administering them. We're often not 100% sure what caused an illness.

There have been a small number of cases where a severe reaction occurred immediately following the administration of a vaccine, and it looked similar to other bad vaccine reactions, so the vaccine injury prevention fund determined that the brain injuries HAD been caused by the vaccine, and they gave the family millions of dollars to try and slightly lessen the fact that their child was typically developing before the vaccine reaction and had a severe life-long disability after the reaction.

This is different from "most autism is caused by a gradual buildup of vaccine toxins" or similar bullshit that's been discredited. Vastly different.

As I said, I'm running into way too many families who know one of the rare cases where someone DID develop a severe developmental disability from a vaccine reaction, and was compensated for this, so they won't vaccinate their own children because they were told by the healthcare profession that vaccines don't ever harm children. We need to stop telling them that vaccines don't ever cause harm and tell them it's incredibly rare but does happen.

up
Voting closed 0

Now, what's the case fatality rate, and the adverse outcome rate (blindness, deafness, brain damage) from having measles?

Unless a kid has had an adverse reaction to vaccination already, it makes no sense to not vaccinate.

up
Voting closed 0

And I tell parents that their kid is much more likely to acquire a developmental disability from these diseases than from the vaccines.

The point I'm trying to make is that some parents are getting told that vaccines never cause developmental disabilities, then they meet one of the people who did sustain a brain injury and subsequent lifelong developmental disability from one, so then they think the whole vaccine thing is a crock. Which it's not.

up
Voting closed 0

Eeka,
You are stating that there is a vaccine "credibility gap" because doctors are denying that serious complications occur. I doubt this is common. I'm always given an CDC information sheet explaining the risks when my children get vaccinated. The ditto references the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I get the same info when I am vaccinated at work. I never read it, but I keep it for a day or so.
I can believe that parents/patients don't absorb the information (written/verbal) that they receive but that is quite different. Doing "informed consent" well is difficult. I have seen both extremes, consent for a major surgery was handed to me without explanation but with a 'sign here" sticky whereas I tend to be so detailed that sometimes the person's eyes glaze over and I realize they have just tuned out. That person could also end up in your office telling you that they never heard anything about "x or y" complication!

up
Voting closed 0

and the one for MMR lists brain damage as a very rare severe reaction.

If someone is telling patients that vaccines never cause harm, then they were not doing their job.

up
Voting closed 0

I don't think the families are getting absolutely no information about vaccine risks. I do know though that there are pediatricians who don't realize that autism is a diagnosis that's given when a person displays the requisite behaviors for this label to be the best descriptor of the person's disability, regardless of whether the person was born with it or acquired it through brain injury. So yes, there are certainly pediatricians saying "vaccines don't ever cause autism."

And then when a parent meets another family who was compensated by the vaccine injury program because their child was perfectly typically developing, then had a vaccine reaction involving hospitalization and brain injury and came out in the end with autism, the family thinks pediatricians are lying liars and doesn't want anything to do with vaccinations.

What pediatricians should be saying is that in really really really rare cases, a child reacts to a vaccine and can develop lifelong disabilities like autism, but that it's really really rare and the child is much more likely to develop a severe disability from measles.

up
Voting closed 0

So is it Au Bon Pain, MJ OConnors, Finale, Tastings, McCormicks, or Melting Pot?

And when was the women there? I think the public should be told...

up
Voting closed 0

Enough about the babies. This isn't an outbreak in babies.

This is an outbreak in adults. It looks like it is adults giving measles to adults. Yes, this can happen - even if those adults were vaccinated as babies.

Did you all get your booster at around age 12? Do you even remember? Do you even know?

My mother had mumps at age 41 and it was hellish and brutal. That was before anybody realized that adults need to be vaccinated and ADULT IMMUNITY CAN WANE OVER TIME.

If you can't find evidence of an adolescent MMR booster, get a booster yourself. That goes for you too, Brett. You might be an undervaccinated germ factory, yourself - and you could get very sick as a result!

up
Voting closed 0

I had measles as a child, back in the mid 60s when that was still not uncommon (and rubella in my early 20s.) Would I still need a booster?

up
Voting closed 0

I don't think you need a booster if you had measles, but you might be vulnerable to mumps (that's what happened to my mom) or to an alternate form of measles (Rubella) that is generally mild but could result in birth defects.

up
Voting closed 0

I've had rubella as well, so mumps is my only risk.

up
Voting closed 0

I had mumps (the ailment) back in preschool, back in the mid 1950's, on both sides at once, and boy, did it hurt!

As for measles, I had them back in the early 1960's, in fifth grade--a mild case of them, because I'd had a gamma globulin injection, which prevented me from getting as sick as I otherwise would've.

As for rubella, I don't remember having it, but I did hear that one can have a really mild case of rubella without even knowing that they have it. That being said, it's possible that I did have rubella without knowing it.

up
Voting closed 0

When I was in college there was an outbreak. It had been discovered that vaccinations given when I was the right tykely age weren't "for life" and the university demanded evidence of the type of vaccine we'd had and/or a booster. Called my peditrician who suggested that the booster would be a good idea and even offered to do it for me! It would have been kind of fun to go back and see him again, but it was easier to do it with my current physician.

I fully intend to get the whooping cough booster and shingles vaccine (which I understand still have an age restriction; I haven't been too young for anything since I became old enough to run for president! :) :) )

So, yes. Get your kids AND YOURSELF vaccinated. It's the neighborly thing to do!

up
Voting closed 0

Get a titer to see if you need a booster before getting the booster.

up
Voting closed 0