Not meaning to imply that your Masters in Public Health is chopped liver @romanigypsyeyes 
Polio used to be live but isnât any longer
I donât ever claim to know the biology behind it, @saintfan so no worries. It is just my job to make sure theyâre safe and get to the population
Yes, but they would be contagious of the weaker vaccine strain of the virus (and they would likely be less contagious due to not coughing, etc. as much). This can still be an issue if one comes into contact with immunocompromised people, but not with people with typical immune response (who would be receiving an accidental vaccination). However, if you will have contact with immunocompromised people, then getting vaccinated and staying away from them during the contagious period of any live virus vaccines would be safer for them then potentially bringing in full strength wild viruses to them.
In rare cases, the oral polio live virus vaccine (no longer used in the US) mutates back into a more dangerous form of polio. It is still a much lower risk than actual polio in places where polio is endemic (hence, the oral polio vaccine is used in such areas due to ease of administration, but the injected inactivated polio vaccine is used in places like the US where polio is not endemic).
Oral polio is not used anymore?! I am ancient. My kid got that.
Another thing to point out RE childhood diseases. People have noted that they remember having had some of those illnesses and were fine. From the linked vaccine.gov web site description of Rubella (German Measles) it is a fairly routine illness for the child who contracts it, but can cause serious birth defects or infant death when a pregnant mother is exposed. One person could remember having had âGerman Measlesâ and it was just a blip in the road, but it could have resulted in tragedy for another family.
Oral polio vaccine is not used in the US any more, but is used in polio-endemic areas. Polio vaccines in the US are now the injected inactivated polio vaccine.
I remember standing in line on a street corner to get my dose of the oral polio vaccine when it first came out. I also remember getting rubella at around age ten, and hosting several young women who were family friends and at or approaching childbearing age, who had not yet contracted the disease.
Also, if you go to the website of Autism Speaks, the organization mentioned as regarding all autistic people as âburdens to their familiesâ and âbetter off deadâ, and thus presumably encouraging parents to be callous wrt adverse outcomes from infectious diseases, you will notice that they do not advocate skipping vaccinations as a strategy for preventing autism.
What they do advocate is scientific investigation into claims regarding the causes and treatments for autism. These claims have in the past included those centered around specific vaccines and vaccine schedules, and Autism Speaks did inform parents that these claims were debunked, quite some time ago.
Most families in the autism community are used to being regarded as burdens to our community public health services and especially to our public school districts and will acknowledge that yes, it can be a burden to raise a child who might never be able to depend on the types of supports that are standard for our society. Nonetheless, most parents I have known will go âover and beyondâ to provide for their autistic children, draining family coffers and adding âsweat equityâ, even if there is uncertain expectation, or no realistic expectation, of ROI.
Nrdsb4 is right. I posted it up there somewhere. âLiveâ virus vaccines are attenuated live virus vaccines. You can shed virus and in the case of the old oral polio vaccine (which is still used in the areas where the virus is endemic, and that is APPROPRIATE for a myriad of epidemiologic reasons), people caring for those infants can rarely get polio from the stool of those infants (bc itâs an oral vaccine, itâs shed in the stool.) It is not just thrown out into the atmosphere for casual contacts to get polio. Live nasal flu vaccine recipients also shed some viral parts in their nasal secretions, and though theoretically someone could get flu from this, no one ever has. The viruses are weakened, only able to stimulate an immune response: we become antibody factories if a real virus tries to come into our bodies. The weakened virus is able to give us the blueprint but canât cause disease. You do not get sick from them. Some people are carriers of things like strep and even the meningococcus (cited in that bogus 'article). But these situations have nothing to do with vaccines.
Weâve used the MMR vaccine for many years and no one has gotten ill from the vaccine. If so we should have seen a small but confirmable background rate of measles or whichever of the three the author thinks is floating around. We havenât. We did see it with polio and that rate became higher than our endemic or âwild-typeâ polio and therefore epidemiologically thatâs the point where you donât use the vaccine. The strains of endemic disease should match those of the vaccine in that case. Does. not. happen. with. measles.
The author of that weird-a** Reuters article is a DENTIST. Many so-called anti-vax âexpertsâ are people who have âmedicalâ degrees in a field other than infectious diseases, epidemiology, even medicine. I would not listen to an internist, a family practitioner, an ophthalmologist, a dentist, etc etc about this issue. Even pediatricians like me can be misinformed or ignorant. Many of us arenât because we deal with families with these questions every day in the office. But weâre not even experts. Many of the âexpertsâ are parents of autistic kids (thereâs a father/son duo out there, they may have some kind of medical-sounding degrees, that are suppliers of fiction). Barbara Loe Fisher named her anti-vax site with a very official-sounding name and that is intentionally confusing imo. No journal these people cite is a respected peer-reviewed article or journal.
Argh.
I found this statement from an anti-vaccine web site:
First of all, note that secondary transmission from the MMR has never been documented. In FIVE DECADES, no secondary transmission from the vaccine has been documented. Hmm, well, would that kind of indicate that MMR doesnât cause viral shedding capable of transmitting disease? Letâs think, hmm, this is a tricky one.
Think of all the people receiving chemo or who are otherwise immunocompromised who are around their children or grandchildren after they have received the MMR. We should have thousands of documented cases of secondary MMR transmission!
Secondly, does the fact that âmeasles RNA has been detected in the URINE of vaccineesâ translate to âtherefore secondary transmission from vaccinees who have measles RNA in their urineâ is a valid risk?
Some of this crap put out by anti-vac groups just sickens me.
Thatâs the crux of this ludicrousness. Itâs not easy to find a physician who will deny the value of vaccinations, so any ânaturopathicâ clown can step up and be a expert. Then freaked-out parents find the BS on the internet and buy into the hysteria.
^ Yes. Viral parts in urine or viral parts in nasal secretions is juuuuuuuust a little bit different than being infected and getting sick. These people are not just kooks anymore. Now theyâre a danger to the public health with both their own unvaccinated kids and the kids of the people theyâre trying to terrify.
Age of Autism is still blaming vaccines.
http://www.ageofautism.com
And surprise, surprise, none of the editors of AoA has any medical training whatsoever.
What Iâm wondering is do they claim that your teen will ârevert to autismâ if vaccinated late? Iâve recently discovered that my kidâs public HS has an shocking number of âpersonalâ vaccination exemptions. I kind of thought that even if you buy into the MMR at 18 months causes autism thing you would recognize that by the time your kid is 15 or 16 that ship has sailed.
@saintfan, yes, there are some factions who describe instantaneous âregressive autismâ in normal, happy, perfectly fine kids almost immediately after vaccination.
I thought they were talking about pre-schoolers, still. Seriously like, âMy kid was on track for his IB diploma and we had him vaccinated and he turned autistic?â
Even older kids? Thatâs insane.
No, I think typically they are preschoolers who allegedly had NO signs or symptoms of autism, absolutely none, who get a vaccine and within hours are lethargic and different, never to return to normal.
My sense is that many non-vaxxers of teenagers have come to the conclusion that all vaccines contain toxic, harmful substances and therefore should not be administered at any age. Once youâve âlearnedâ that vaccines contain things harmful to humans like formaldehyde and mercury and cause allergies, asthma and cancer, and have joined a community of like-minded parents who acknowledge your âtruthâ itâs easy to see a failure to vaccinate as a dodged bullet. Obviously I put âlearnedâ and âtruthâ in quotes because there is no science behind this position.
I also think people become entrenched in their positions. If youâve spent year after year advocating for a link between autism and vaccines and urging other parents to skip the vaccines it must be hard to back down entirely and admit you were just plain wrong. Instead we humans seem to find it easier to plow ahead and search for research that confirms our initial bias.