Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Measles Cases Triple in U.S., Vaccine Refusal Here and Elsewhere to Blame

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Image: Teseum (CC), Flickr

Measles, one of the most communicable of all infectious diseases, is spiking in the United States, with three times as many cases as usual this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The spike is due to both foreign importations — infected travelers coming from places where measles is not under control — and local vulnerability: unvaccinated children and adults in the United States.

In a press briefing, the CDC’s director Dr. Thomas Frieden said that from January to November, there were 175 known cases of measles in the US, with 20 of those people having to be hospitalized. The agency would expect to see about 60 cases, he said. Those cases came from 52 separate travelers. Most of the time, the imported virus found only a few people to infect — but nine times, the imports caused large outbreaks, always in people who had not received the vaccine.

“It is not a failure of the vaccine,” Frieden said. “It’s a failure to vaccinate. Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.”
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Is Childhood Pertussis Vaccine Less Effective Than We Thought?

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Delicately and cautiously, health authorities in the United States and other countries are beginning to open up a difficult topic: Whether the extraordinary ongoing epidemic of whooping cough, the worst in more than 50 years, may be due in part to unexpected poor performance by the vaccine meant to prevent the disease.

That possibility, captured in several recent pieces of research — one published last night — is being raised so carefully because it might lead vaccine opponents to claim incorrectly that pertussis vaccination does not work. That fear contains a deep irony: The current vaccine, in use for about 20 years, replaced an older and more effective one that went out of use because vaccine critics charged it had too high a rate of side effects.

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Update: Pakistan, Polio, Fake Vaccines And The CIA

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Regular readers will remember my outraged rant post from almost a year ago, reacting to the news that the Central Intelligence Agency faked a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a way of getting close to Osama Bin Laden’s hide-out, hoping to prove his presence by using a vaccine needle to grab a sample of DNA.

I felt, and still feel, that the maneuver — which was belatedly acknowledged by the CIA — was a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations. I especially felt it endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children — an accusation that seems fantastic, but begins to make sense when you realize some of those areas have perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns.

I take no pleasure in saying the prediction came true. [Read more…]

How a U.S. Court Case Explains Problems Eradicating Polio

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One of the perennial problems blocking polio eradication is the persistent belief that the rounds of vaccination meant to protect children are actually a covert campaign to harm them. I’ve seen it myself, in my reporting, and studies examining the 23-year effort’s inability to get to zero describe it as well.

From the sanitized safety of the industrialized world, it’s hard to imagine how any neighborhood or tribe could hold such views. Which is why the report on Friday of news regarding a 15-year-old court case is so important. The actions that prompted the case created mistrust so long-lasting that it undermines unrelated medical campaigns, including polio, today.

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File Under WTF: Did the CIA Fake a Vaccination Campaign?

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A number of years ago, I was in New Delhi, at the end of an exhausting 18 hours  in which I had torn around the city to watch a National Immunization Day. On those days — like a national holiday, with flags and banners and kids let out from school — tens of millions of children line up to stick out their tongues and receive the sugary drops that contain the vaccine that should protect them against polio.

The Indian government, along with the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the volunteer ground troops of Rotary International, has been organizing these days now for most of two decades, always coming closer to the goal of eradicating polio, never quite getting there. On this day, which occurred close to the end of weeks I had spent embedded with a WHO “STOP Polio” team, 135 million children were expected to queue in cities and suburbs and rich neighborhoods and slums. I spent the day with the team I had been observing, racing in a battered turquoise Tata from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to understand where the campaign’s message was working and where its earnest persuasions had failed. (You can read my account of the day here.)

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