@fretfulmother --my second also had a febrile seizure when 13 months old. I wasn’t “not treating the fever” but in that case it climbed high so fast and we were out during the day (he seemed okay in the morning.) Poor kid was never allowed to have one degree of temperature rise after that! (slight exaggeration.) I NEVER wanted to see that again.
@garland yes!!!
New meningitis B outbreak:
http://studenthealth.oregonstate.edu/about-shs/health-alerts/meningococcal-update-03-06-17
Ugh 
Meningitis still scares the crap out of me. I know I’ve said it before but someone died in my dorm of meningitis. “Luckily”, it didn’t spread.
I’m going to my Rheum tomorrow anyway. Guess it’s time to ask if I can/should get a meningitis vaccine.
The Somali immigrant community was targeted by anti-vaxxers. Targeted! You can easily predict the rest…
From the above linked article:
Of course he doesn’t.
We need a “rolls eyes” emoji.
This is especially heartbreaking since immigrants tend to have much higher vaxx rates than native-born Americans.
I really hope there is a special level of hell for the people who prey on vulnerable communities in order to spread their nonsense. They should have to be permanently housed in the children’s ward, watching these children and their families suffer, until the very last case.
Not that I think the suffering means anything to them because clearly this suffering (and potential death) is less of a problem to them than autism. (Which, AGAIN, is a widely debunked myth that needs to die a painful death.)
One of my sons was at the babysitter when he began burning up with fever. She called me at work but I was in court. It was before cell phones were ubiquitous so one of my colleagues drove to the courthouse to find me. I met the baby sitter at her pediatrician’s office as mine was on vacation. Hers opened his office an hour early to see my son. My son began to seize at the office. The doctor grabbed a suppository and inserted it. Within 10 minutes, his fever was coming down. It turned out that he had Coxsackie virus. His best friend, whose parents were close friends of ours, had come home from vacation with a little cold. We got together with them and, apparently, what barely registered on his friend was virulent in my son. After that, I always kept fever suppositories in the freezer on the advice of my friend’s doctor, who became ours as well after that day. I know that if my son’s friend’s mom had realized he had Coxsackie, she never would have brought him over.
However, back in the day, my mom told me that when I had the German measles in 1960, all of the teenaged girls in the neighborhood who hadn’t had it yet were brought by my house to get them exposed. By that time, people knew that exposure could damage a fetus but there was no vaccine yet so exposing young women to it before they were ready to have children was an accepted way of life. Needless to say, my children are completely vacccinated.
I’m currently researching in a city with very high unvaccination rates (also happens to be where my parents live). There have been numerous measles and whooping cough outbreaks her in the last few years. Schools shut down to contain the breakout. What a waste of school days!
Since I do my research in the library, I always check before I come up whether or not there have been any reported communicable illnesses up here. I’m completely vaccinated but because of my immune suppression meds, we’re really not sure what I’m protected against.
Before I go archive diving, I have to get a lot of things together. Trying to figure out whether or not I’ll be exposed to measles shouldn’t be one of them! Arghh
Oh…there is this gem…http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/health/breast-feeding-natural-vaccine-fears/
Yup, in addition to being discriminatory against individuals who are physiologically incapable of breast (wait…one is supposed to say ‘chest’) feeding, calling it a ‘natural thing’ leads to people not vaccinating their kids.
There ya go. Stop the breastfeeding and increase the vax rates.
And Alice thought the rabbit hole was an altered reality.
It’s just crazy. Someone I know posted a “do you know what vaccines contain” piece on Facebook, which was a scare tactic about aluminum. I countered with a long article be CHOP (which has a very good debunking section about vaccines). Well. The fur began to fly.
It’s just so frustrating. They attempt to sound scientific in their doubts but they don’t listen at all to evidence that comes from the FDA or any other government source.
Andrew Wakefield is a fraud. After an extensive investigation, the British authorities barred him from ever practicing medicine in the UK/EU again. His “research” papers were also retraced by the Lancet and the Lancet took the unusual step of declaring them to be based on fraudulent research. Unable to practice in Britain and the EU, he promptly moved to the USA. It’s a tragedy that he continues to promulgate his falsehoods.
In the centuries before vaccines, people did something similar with the smallpox. People would use the scabs from others who had smallpox to infect themselves with a “mild” case of smallpox (variolation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Variolation ). Obviously, this was more dangerous than using cowpox and other less dangerous infections that could induce immunity to smallpox, so when that was discovered, vaccination replaced variolation.
It’s important to emphasize what exlibris97 says. Plenty of published medical research turns out, after all, to be incorrect for one reason or another. People make mistakes and science marches on.
But Wakefield deliberately falsified his research. He knowingly published lies.
For those of you who can access British TV, today Britain’s Channel 4 is airing a major documentary on Andrew Wakefield and President Trump’s apparent affinity for his vaccine “theories”. It’s entitled, “Trump, the Doctor, and the Vaccine Scandal”. Turns out Wakefield set up charities and steered most of their income to himself. He also paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in “salary” for questionable research.
@exlibris97 thank you for the head’s up!
Science magazine just had 10 pages of articles on vaccines, including “Can skeptical parents be persuaded to vaccinate?”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/can-skeptical-parents-be-persuaded-vaccinate
When I was a young, fired-up pediatrician, I wanted to kick non-vaccinating families out of my practice, and I see that happening today. I can understand the sentiment. But with time, age and experience, I found that building a relationship with families, understanding their concerns and talking with them got them to eventually reevaluate their perceptions and they ended vaccinating their kids at about a 95% rate. Building rapport with patients and being a bit flexible really helps.
That’s admirable jaylynn, and I’m beyond thrilled that you got results, but I’m grateful that there are peds are saying no in order to protect their vulnerable patients.
I think there should be some sort of notice about whether or not a doctor accepts unvaccinated (by choice) patients- similar to how they show they speak X language or whatever. It would be helpful to immune compromised patients like me (but most patients won’t care, just like most English speaking patients don’t care if a doc speaks Hindi so doesn’t look).
It seems like it would be an imperfect solution to an even more imperfect situation
You dont have to answer but I am genuinely curious. I’m in a city right now that has had multiple outbreaks of vaccine preventive diseases lately. Do you think you would still keep the same policy under these circumstances? I’m really not judging, I’m just curious. I got out of public health in part because my head and heart couldn’t agree on what should be done in cases like this and I didn’t think I would be very effective because of that.
Really good questions @romanigypsyeyes. I’m the most pro-vaccine doc ever, but in my experience, kicking patients out merely results in people without a medical home, spreading germs, never with a regular doctor, STILL never vaccinating and now hating doctors. Lose-lose. If we know a child is coming in with possible cpox or measles or pertussis we shunt them into an isolation room and don’t let them hang out in the waiting room. Yes, still risks.
I don’t know what the best answer is. It may well be policy, not a ‘medical’ answer, eg, schools which do away with the vaccine exemptions for philosophical reasons. Those alone have gotten a fair number of delayed- or anti-vaccinators to come around.
My comment was mostly in response to the article referred to above, which discusses all of these approaches and how they do, or don’t, work.