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Editorial: Reject scare tactics on vaccinations

 
Tampa Bay Times
Published Feb. 4, 2015

Medical research has repeatedly demonstrated that vaccines work and do not cause disorders or diseases. Yet emotionally charged rhetoric and political posturing after the recent outbreak of measles in California has nearly drowned out a responsible discussion of public health and obscured the bottom line: Barring medical necessity or extremely limited religious objections, vaccinations should be required for all children. The government should tighten exemption rules to ensure compliance rather than listen to unfounded scare tactics.

Measles is extremely contagious, and so-called herd immunity is key to avoiding an outbreak. Either because they are too young or too sick, some patients cannot get vaccinated. Their health is endangered if too many others have voluntarily opted out of vaccinations.

One of the greatest by-products of the U.S. immunization movement is the eradication of preventable diseases such as polio, smallpox and measles. But the public's health remains threatened by people who refuse vaccinations for themselves or their children and come into contact with the general public.

Public health officials trace the latest outbreak of measles to unvaccinated travelers who visited California's Disneyland in December. So far, that state has recorded 40 cases of the measles directly linked to Disneyland and another 19 cases with a looser tie. In all, more than 100 people in 14 states have been sickened by the outbreak in the United States and Mexico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, the Health Department has identified four cases of measles, including two linked to foreign travelers. There are no confirmed cases among Florida residents.

Just 15 years ago, the United States declared that measles had been eliminated from the country, largely because of a robust vaccination program that began in 1963. Before that, 3 million to 4 million people contracted measles annually. Each year, as many as 500 people died, 48,000 required hospital stays and 4,000 developed brain swelling, the CDC said. Now outbreaks are typically linked to unvaccinated foreign travelers or residents who object to immunizations for religious or philosophical reasons.

The most recent iteration of the antivaccine movement can be traced to a discredited 1998 study published in the Lancet in which a British doctor wrote that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could be linked to autism. Since then, the majority of the study's authors have backed away from those claims. The medical journal retracted the work in 2010, and the doctor who led the research effort has lost his medical license. Years of credible scientific research conducted in the United States and Europe also debunked the study. Yet in some corners, an antivaccine hysteria stubbornly persists.

The CDC recorded 644 cases of measles in 2014, a spike it says was largely the result of unvaccinated residents in a religious community in Ohio and travelers from the Philippines, where a large outbreak had occurred.

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The debate about the need for vaccines should be over. But so long as the controversy rages on, government and public health officials have a duty to stick to the facts when discussing the benefits and risks of vaccinations — and to point the public to decades of irrefutable scientific research that has reached the same conclusion: Vaccines work.