A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a CNN article entitled: U.S. measles cases in 2013 may be most in 17 years. To anyone sitting on the fence, wondering if they should vaccinate their child, there’s a lot of scary-sounding information in that article:
“This year is on track to be the worst for measles in more than a decade, according to new numbers released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
“There were 159 cases of measles in the United States from January 1 through August 24”
“This is very bad. This is horrible,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University who was on a telephone briefing with the CDC Thursday morning. “The complications of measles are not to be toyed with, and they’re not altogether rare.”
“According to the CDC, one to three out of every 1,000 children in the United States who get measles will die from the disease, even with the best of care.”
“Even if complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis aren’t deadly, they can make children very sick; in 2011, nearly 40% of children under the age of 5 who got measles had to be treated in the hospital.”
STOP RIGHT THERE! I’m calling my doctor… we’re getting the kids vaccinated RIGHT NOW!
Or not. Lets take a closer look at those statistics, shall we?
According to the article: “one to three out of every 1,000 children in the United States who get measles will die from the disease, even with the best of care.” Okay… and how many children in the US get the measles? Again, to quote the article “159 cases of measles in the United States from January 1 through August 24.”
So in an EIGHT MONTH period 159 out of the roughly 74 MILLION children in the US got measles. Lets give that a visual:
This map comes from the CDC website published August 24, 2013
Number of measles cases (N = 159), by state — United States, 2013:
Pretty scary stuff. Especially for those of us living in Kentucky.
But what about all these bad, horrible, “not to be toyed with” complications? What about the deaths?!
If, according to the article, 1-3 (we’ll estimate high and go with the number 3) out of every 1,000 children who get measles will die from measles and only 159 children got the measles in an 8 month period, that means roughly ONE child will die of measles every FOUR years.(Actually, there hasn’t been a measles death since 2003, despite years and years of “outbreaks.”)
And all those scary side effects that land so many kids in the hospital every year?
“Nearly 40% of children under the age of 5 who got measles had to be treated in the hospital”
For the sake of argument, lets say that all 159 children who have gotten the measles this year were under the age of 5. 63 of those children (40%) had to be treated in the hospital. 63. Can we stop and think about that for a second? 63 out of 74 MILLION children in this country had to be hospitalized because of the measles.
Pretty scary stuff. Statistically speaking, my children have more chance of being bit by a poisonous snake, drowning in a pool, or being killed by a tornado than they have of getting (and having complications from) measles. (Not to mention the fact that vaccinations aren’t always effective.)
Now lets compare that number with a much, much scarier number. 1 in 88 kids in the United States are suffering from autism. ONE IN EIGHTY-EIGHT. Don’t think vaccines cause autism? Here are a number of studies that show otherwise. It’s the largest epidemic in the history of the world.
Where are the CNN articles reporting on THAT?
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Rina Marie 
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