The Galtian vision:
Whooping cough, or pertussis, a highly infectious respiratory disease once considered doomed by science, has struck Washington State this spring with a severity that health officials say could surpass the toll of any year since the 1940s, before a vaccine went into wide use.
Although no deaths have been reported so far this year, the state has declared an epidemic and public health officials say the numbers are staggering: 1,284 cases through early May, the most in at least three decades and 10 times last year’s total at this time, 128.
The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts.
Budget cuts so we can lavish money on the rich combined with idiots like Jenny McCarthy and Michele Bachmann spewing nonsense about vaccinations is really paying some dividends.
Baud
FALSE. This just shows taxes aren’t low enough.
BGinCHI
We won’t even have bananas in this republic when the right is through with it.
fasteddie9318
Just to be clear, we’re mostly talking about Moocher children, right?
The Moar You Know
It’s like mixing alcohol and Xanax, you get more bang out of both them when you do.
The Moar You Know
oh hey I just found another banned word.
Baud
FTA:
henqiguai
@OP
Thought I saw a news item this week claiming that an infant had died of pertussis out in Washington state this week.
Ripley
Welfare Queens and Strapping Young Bucks getting whooping cough vaccinations? Not on my dime, consarn it!
Lojasmo
I was diagnosed with pertussis seven or eight years ago. It was freaking terrible.
Jeff Spender
Perhaps this will convince the pig-ignorant masses that these diseases are serious and not something to fuck around with.
Perhaps they’ll start to vaccinate their children again.
Perhaps I hit my head and lost connection with reality for a minute.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
If we’d just get these regulations out of its way, the free market would surely take care of this whoopie cough thingie, and make somebody a handsome profit in the doing!
It’s simple economics: people will decide that they’d prefer a brand-new XBox 360 over having their infant child die of disease, and they’ll make the informed choice. I don’t understand why you liberals don’t get this. Is it because of your childlike nature?
Dan Riehl will know.
Anonymous At Work
This isn’t due to poverty. This is due to parents exempting their children from vaccines because of a fraudulent study and a state’s very generous exemption statute. This is also the self-involved life-style of Western US at play: looking out for me and mine over society.
Just Some Fuckhead
How do we know this epidemic isn’t God’s punishment for Washington State legalizing gay marriage? The timing is too eerie to be coincidental.
beltane
This is the one phenomenon I mostly blame on the hippies. I have had to distance myself from many former acquaintances due to their stance on this issue. Unfortunately, an anti-science mindset combined with big dose of “my kid is more special than everyone else’s kid” attitude is not confined to the wingnuts.
Crusty Dem
This is about 2% government funding an 98% anti-vax jackasses. They’re pretty strong with that stupid here in WA.
Causing even more problems are recent reports suggesting that prior (out of date) vaccination may increase disease risk. The solution is keeping vaccinated, unless you’re anti-vax, then it’s “do nothing and blame governments and drug companies for everything..
Ash Can
Here in Chicago, public school students must have all their vaccinations, on schedule, or they’re not allowed in the building. Does Washington state have the same policy? If so, where are all these kids going to school? Is WA state turning out a bumper crop of home-schooled turnips?
R-Jud
@Lojasmo: I’m just getting over it now. Ripped cartilage in my ribcage coughing.
Jeff Spender
@beltane:
Exactly this. I’ve noticed a lot of my intelligent liberal-leaning friends tend to fall for pseudo-science, because I think it plays into their preconceived notions about pharmaceutical companies and all that.
They’re sure they’re right because they read a few blogs that made a lot of sense, and that science can’t be trusted because it’s bought and paid for by the pharms.
So a few people don’t vaccinate, and herd immunity breaks down. These people don’t understand that they’re personal choices are putting other people at risk. Sort of like second-hand smoke (which most of them rant about).
The ignorance–it is stunning.
gene108
@BGinCHI:
Dammit man! We have NO BANANAS NOW!
We outsourced their production to Mexico and Central America years ago.
beltane
@Ash Can: In some states, like mine, parents can receive an exemption for religious or “philosophical” reasons. Parents who object to their children being exposed to these unvaccinated walking biohazards do not seem to have any rights in this regard.
WereBear
@Jeff Spender: Ignorance, yes; of epidemics.
There were generations who lost siblings every cycle with this kind of thing; and gladly extended their arms for vaccinations. But with success, came obliviousness to how this ended; and the thinking that it’s gone.
BGinCHI
@Ash Can: Yep, and when we had our baby they very strongly recommended the whooping cough vaccine. No one I know skips it.
Have the fundies noticed that God is not in the life-saving business?
gene108
OT: I went to the dealership to get my ’03 Corolla’s air compressor fixed.
I know my brakes are beginning to go (making the grinding noise at times, but not critical to get replaced yet).
The dealership wanted $491 to replace my front brakes, including rotors and other stuff.
Is this the new going price for brakes? Seems awfully high to me.
Mnemosyne
@Ash Can:
A lot of Western states (including California) have very generous exemption policies. Most states only allow religious or health exemptions (because some kids do have immune system problems or allergies that mean they can’t be vaccinated), but California and Washington (and possibly Oregon?) allow parents to say they have a “philosophical” objection to vaccination and send their kids to school anyway.
BGinCHI
@gene108: OMG, it’s worse than I thought!
To the shelter!
gene108
@BGinCHI:
I don’t think a large chunk of the anti-vaccine folks are right-wing fundies.
A good sub-set of those guys are probably the spawn of DFH, who have a conspiratorial view towards authority and being told what to do.
It’s just the other end, in a political sense, of the anti-science strain that infects our country.
beltane
@Jeff Spender: Many of these people like to refer to these formerly common childhood diseases as “natural”. They are seemingly unaware that “nature” would likely claim the life of rough one out of every two children before the age of adulthood. Nostalgia for the imagined purity of the 19th century is a truly pernicious mindset.
BGinCHI
@gene108: If what you’re asking on this thread is whether there is a vaccine for brakes, no, there isn’t.
But do get a second opinion.
RAM
Too bad whooping cough can’t be directed back on the parents of these poor kids to assure the gene pool would be cleansed. On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet those moron parents WERE vaccinated for DPT by their parents. It would be interesting to note how the laws have been watered down out there. As Ash Can said @15, here in Illinois DPT vaccinations are required before kids can attend school.
BGinCHI
@gene108: Gotcha. You are right about that. I have some family members like that (younger ones). They make a lot of good decisions (organic, raising their kids in smart ways), but they distrust science.
I’m afraid the younger generation is growing up with so much technology that they overlook science. It’s ironic, but so much of what we have now makes it look as though there is no fundamental science behind it (nor any labor to produce it).
Geoduck
As a WA state resident..
The corner of the state being the hardest hit is not the most wingnutty (that’s over east the Cascades) but it still has a lot of knuckledraggers running around. No idea how much this is genuinely contributing to the problem.
As the article hinted, despite our hippie reputation, our tax structure is painfully regressive and dependent on economic booms; the state is at least making a big advertising push for people to get vaccinated. I had it done. I could afford the $60, but I wonder how many people can’t. I did hear somewhere that they are at least trying to get some free shots out to people who can’t afford it.
Skerry
@Ash Can:
In Maryland, a parent can claim a religious exemption for vaccinations.
Crusty Dem
Here in WA you can sign a waiver and send your unvaccinated children to school. I know because when I went to sign the kids up I didn’t have their full vaccination schedule with me (not sure what I was thinking) and was able to get around it by signing one sheet of paper, you don’t even need to have a reason..
Cermet
@R-Jud: Very sorry you went through that.
As for these parents, they are just trying to cull the herd by being total dumb shits – proof that some people are as stupid as rush the talking anus.
No one except if the vaccination causes life threating issues should ever be allowed into any public school unless vaccinated – period. Insane.
Abstruse
Ask one of these indigo-parents if they agree with Muslim clerics about polio vaccines causing sterility and they’ll laugh at you.
SMH
Ilia
Agreed with the commenter above, this is almost entirely an anti-vaxxer problem. And those morons not only endanger their own kids, they also endanger old people, children under the age of 2, people who are immune compromised, etc. when they let these diseases spread.
Assholes.
scav
@BGinCHI:
The right is taking over the job of being bananas quite well as far as I can see. (shhh, don’t tell them that makes them technically fruit though.)
Randy P
I wish some Democrat could come up with a pithy response to the old “tax-and-spend-liberal” line along the lines of “do you REALLY object to police and fire departments, roads, public libraries, public health departments, your local parks and recreation department, etc? Do you REALLY have a problem spending on those things?”
I was shocked to learn a few elections ago that my county, Delaware County in PA, doesn’t actually have a public health department. I learned it when Democrat David Landau ran for Council Chair partly on a platform of creating one. Not coincidentally, our county has been Republican controlled for over a century, and Landau tried to educate voters on the fact that none of us knows where the county budget actually goes.
waratah
Where I live they do not want to pay for low income and children that might not be citizens to get those shots free even tho they go to school with their children.
Jeff
@Lojasmo: It is called the “Hundred Day Cough”, and no one who has had it would ever wish it on their worst enemy. The worst part is that while antibiotics can stop the infection, the cough just keeps on going. It is now recognized as a serious pathogen even for adults, and some authorities are recommending re vaccination for some populations.
Ash Can
@beltane:
@Mnemosyne:
I’d like to think that something like this would make them reconsider the generosity of those exemptions, but then I’d also like to think that only the usual 27% of the electorate would be mentally unstable enough to want to vote for Mitt Romney.
@BGinCHI: I’m with Beltane and Gene108; this one isn’t on the fundies. This is of a piece with the whole back-to-nature movement on the left, going back decades. This movement certainly has its advantages, such as in calling out pesticides, chemical additives in foods, unsustainable farming, etc. But, just like with the anti-science idiots on the right, when it involves rejecting the findings of people more knowledgeable than oneself, to the demonstrable detriment of others, then it ain’t the science that’s at fault.
Jeff
@Crusty Dem: That is insane.
Jeff
@Geoduck: In NY we have had outbreaks in the past that were centered around various Mennonite communities that don’t believe in vaccination or are not connected to the public health system
Walker
@gene108:
Including rotors, that is about standard price. I have had it done twice now. Indeed, that price has been pretty stable about a decade.
EIGRP
I’m making all my kids get the HPV vaccine, mostly so they can just be sex machines as teenagers.
Eric
Lancelot Link
This is actually a bipartisan idiocy;
scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/04/dan_burtons_last_antivaccine_hurrah.php
kdaug
Dunno, this is pretty damned easy.
Get your kid vaccinated, and watch the rest die around them.
Sure, your kid may lose some friends in the process, but it solves school overcrowding.
I mean, don’t we all want 1-on-1 teacher/pupil interaction?
Easy when your kid is the only one left in the class.
Smells like a win-win from here.
Ilia
@EIGRP: Everyone should get the HPV vaccine. Women, for preventing cervical cancer. Men, for preventing condylomas (genital warts), as well as oropharyngeal cancer. This is a very underreported issue, but a huge number of head and neck cancers are thought to be caused by HPV, and the number of men who die each year from them may approach how many women die of cervical cancer. Everybody, please vaccinate your kids and yourselves.
lamh35
Interestingly, part of my duties when I worked in the Public Health lab in NOLA was doing Bpert PCR and culture, so I know from pertussis
BGinCHI
@Ash Can: Agreed. See my later post. The fundies are still fucking idiots though.
trollhattan
@Jeff:
This. A co-worker had pertussis romp through her family–husband and two kids caught it, she and one kid did not–and it lingered for a couple months with the kids and half a year with the husband. Basically, half a year without a single night’s actual sleep. Cracked ribs from coughing, more or less a total fun ride.
And it’s basically a nineteenth-century malady.
EIGRP
@Ilia: No kidding. 4 boys and a girl will all get it. I have a friend who had cervical cancer. It’s no joke (I know you weren’t), especially if it can be prevented by something as simple as a vaccine.
Eric
trollhattan
@Ash Can:
I’ll grant a genesis within the back-to-nature/DFH set, but in my last several years’ experience the home skewlin’, weapons-and-food-stashin’ wingers have taken it and run, run, run with it.
They’re the ones who live in the hills and hold chicken pox parties and drag their kids to the local quarry and tell my geologist friend to skip the whole “this deposit is n-million years old” part of her lesson.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Penn and Teller on vaccines
Jeff
@trollhattan: I actually have a certain fondness for those 18th and 19th century names. The “common cold” seems so bland next to “catarrh”, and TB’s nom de guerre of “consumption” actually seems to to describe the disease quite aptly.
For the your consumption:
youtube.com/watch?v=OoQiZujWKQI
Anoniminous
@Abstruse:
No idea what an “indigo-parent” was so I trotted on over to Google (thus depriving you of the opportunity to Edimacate the Ignorunt) and …
These people are frickin’ NUTS!
NancyDarling
I haven’t read through the thread, but somewhere I read that teenagers and adults are also getting pertussis in WA. Apparently we all need booster shots on some sort of schedule. I think tetanus booster is every 10 years. I don’t know for pertussis.
Spaghetti Lee
@Randy P:
I once saw an editorial cartoon (in the Chicago Trib, no less), featuring broken roads, busted fire hydrants, etc., with the caption “Your tax cuts at work.” Always thought that was a good one.
gene108
@Randy P:
You’d be surprised how many people would rather not have to pay for those things.
A very vocal subset of right-wingers, who seem to have gone mainstream, and tend to control the debate on the Right and shout over people on the Left pretty much won in 2010, with a platform of cutting budgets, in order get government to the size “we can afford”.
Democrats did try to make an issue of teachers, fire-fighters and police getting laid off because state and local governments didn’t have money or would run out of money, once ARRA funds dried up, back in 2010.
It didn’t make much of dint in the right-wing vote or the moderate votes.
Jeff
@NancyDarling: Public health authorities are coming to recognize that whooping cough AKA pertussis, vaccinations will fade over time. Perhaps the adult will get milder disease, that only seem like a cold that hangs on longer, but they can still transmit the disease to others such as infants and the elderly.
BGinKC
@gene108: If it’s making noise, the pads are gone and the rivets are damaging the surfaces of the rotors. It’s much cheaper to, every couple of years, go in and have the pads replaced before they’re completely gone. (Sez the chick who said fuck it and bought a condo that’s a block from three public transit lines and two blocks from another one.)
RSA
@Jeff Spender:
Exactly. It’s ironic that libertarians sometimes describe our citizenry as sheep–in some ways it helps human beings quite a bit.
cmorenc
@beltane:
The problem is that many from the hippie have a radical social libertarianism overlaid by radical organic sensibilities, and have more in common with Ron Paul’s followers than with the progressive community. Because of their radical organic viewpoint, too many of them credulously trust naturopathic quacks too much and the traditional medical community too little, viewing the latter as under the thumb of a corrupt pharmaceutical industry. Not that the latter aren’t due some skepticism and naturopathic remedies aren’t sometimes good for you. However, just as with economic libertarian ideologues, many of these organic hippies have crossed over into being ideologues of radical organicism that cannot fail, but can only be failed, and hermetically seal themselves from all but ideologically compatible sources of information couched comfortably in pseudo-organic-speak.
NancyDarling
You should all get your Hepatitis B vaccine also. It’s a series of three shots and should be given in the arm, not your butt. I got mine in the 80’s and it was given in the butt. I had an anti-body titre done later and I was not immune so had to repeat it. Does anyone know if boosters are required for Hep B?
Cermet
here is a better reason than hippies –
So lets cut those taxes and save the 0.1% and let gov drown in a bath tube – like who would could possibly be hurt? Like, who needs health care – I’m sure a large percentage of those 14.6% hate Obama-care because, well, because he’s a big, smart black man … says it all.
NancyDarling
@cmorenc: It’s not just DFH’s. One of my dearest friends is a USC grad in dental hygiene as am I. She’s into oogety-boogety alternative medicines, crystals, etc. She would not get the Hep B vaccine and it eventually got her. She’s been battling chronic hepatitis (with a very expensive drug) for over 10 years. She still won’t admit she should have had the vaccine when the rest of us got it. I don’t argue with her—she’s too old to change.
DecidedFenceSitter
@Ash Can: Actually Chicago/Illinois has the religious exemption most states have:
“Parents who object to health examinations or any part thereof, or to immunizations, on religious grounds shall not be required to submit their children or wards to the examinations or immunizations to which they so object if such parents or legal guardians present to the appropriate local school authority a signed statement of objection, detailing the grounds for the objection”
And as a friend of mine, who I’ve argued with, says, “All they require me to do is sign a paper that says I have a religious exemption.”
Richard
I’d put Oprah Winfrew on the list of idiots, as she gave McCarthy and the quack who produced the bogus vaccine study their biggest platform.
Lojasmo
@gene108:
That’s damn high, unless your calipers Ned rebuilding (which they may, since yu took your brakes way past unsafe). ((grinding means there is no pad left))
VidaLoca
Interestingly it turns out that WA is not the only place having an outbreak of pertussis. We’re having one here at the moment in Milwaukee WI. It has already killed several small children and hospitalized both other children and adults.
Now, I’m not in the healthcare professions but my wife, who’s a nursing instructor and a former public health nurse, was telling me the other night that part of the problem is that a number of years ago, in the wake of the anti-vax scare, the drug companies were casting about for a vaccine formulation that would address the anti-vaxxers’ fears w/r/t side effects.
So they found a formulation. And it became the standard. And that was the formulation that was given to a lot of (what were at the time) kids.
Years went by.
Now, turns out that that formulation is — wait for it — much less effective than the previously accepted one. In other words you may think you’ve got the shots, you may think you’re protected and so are your kids. And you may be completely wrong.
In other words the herd immunity has been compromised not only by the left-wing anti-science DFH ignoranti — it’s also been compromised by people who at the time thought they were doing the right thing by their kids. And now those very same kids are making the very same mistake.
Which would suggest that the only way to fix this would be to re-vaccinate the whole herd (or at least the part born after the formulation changed).
Has anyone else heard anything like this?
YellowJournalism
Someone I know in WA had to get a whooping cough booster recently. It’s going around her school like crazy.
Speaking of crazy, my sis’s in-laws are anti-vaccine because of the false autism links. I’ve told my sis it’s a good thing the subject wasn’t brought up when I was around them. The mom uses the autism link as an excuse, though. She just didn’t want to put her kids in daycare so she didn’t have to go back to work. (She admitted this to someone else.) The daycares have stricter policies on vaccinations than the schools have.
ant
@gene108:
sounds about right to me. I had somebody I know put mine on in my 2000 intrepid. Cost bout 280 in parts.
Then a week later, one of my break lines sprung a leak. all rusted to shit.
Along with a new motor for my driver side window, that deal was over 800. mostly labor.
Getting brakes done on my tundra while back was over 500 as well.
See if you can find someone you know that knows how. buy em a case a beer to do it. prolly %45 at least of the cost you’re quoting is labor.
fasteddie9318
Hey, maybe Current can do a documentary about how not getting your kids vaccinated leads to lots of sick and dead kids! Oh, no, there’s no space on the schedule for anything like that amidst all the anti-vax documentaries.
Linda Featheringill
I actually had whooping cough, many long years ago. I was a very healthy teenager and yet I stayed in bed for about four weeks and stayed home from school another two weeks. Yuck!
I pity the very young and the very old who happen to get it.
Silver
Simple solution to this: if you’re not vaccinated, you get to go to school exclusively with other kids who aren’t vaccinated.
Interrobang
@Silver: Well, unvaccinated kids can still transmit it to other vaccinated kids (because no vaccine works 100% of the time for various reasons), even if they’re not in school together. How do you propose to keep all the little disease bombs out of the local shopping malls, fast food joints, parks, and other public venues? Me, my Inner Fascists thinks they should have to go live on an island somewhere, preferably without contact with the sane people elsewhere.
Then there’s the issue that you just can’t vaccinate some people — transplant patients, people who are in treatment for cancer, people with AIDS and other immunocompromising conditions, and so on.
There are also the personal/other cases: My sister’s been vaccinated for chicken pox three times, and had the disease twice, and has never been able to raise any antibodies for it, so here in Ontario, she’s prohibited from working with children. My mother is also going through treatment for breast cancer, and while she was doing her chemo, her white blood cell count fell to 0 (meaning she had basically no immune system left) and wound up in the hospital from a bladder infection. I’m glad nobody’s little Wakefraud-worshipping biological weapons were around at the time. Me, I had pertussis when I was nine, and I still remember my dad holding my head over the toilet (because I was coughing too uncontrollably to do it myself) in the middle of the night, while I vomited continually from coughing so hard…
I hate, loathe, despise needles, and I’m the first one in the doctor’s office for any vaccines I’m due…especially after I got H1N1 the other year a month before the vaccine came out, and my lungs still aren’t right.
Chris T.
On the bright side, after you’ve had your three months of coughing so hard that you vomit and sometimes break ribs, you (supposedly) have lifetime immunity. While it’s serious for adults, it’s rarely fatal. It’s the young ones that are at the most risk.
The DPT vaccine I got as a kid wears off after roughly 30 years. I believe I caught pertussis in northern Idaho or Montana in the mid 1990s, after a trip that went through Coeur d’Alene among other places.
pseudonymous in nc
Yeah, this is mainly down to anti-vaxers who think their kids are special snowflakes — though I will say that the shambles of American healthcare makes it very easy for quackery to continue to flourish. (Even though the Wakefield anti-MMR stuff emerged in the UK, and there was a dip in vaccination until his study was refuted, childhood vax levels in Britain are now higher than they were pre-dip.)
I was vaccinated against whooping cough; my sister wasn’t, because there was a fear at the time that the DPT vaccine might cause brain damage, and she ended up terribly sick with it.
The Pale Scot
Well, as much as I like to help you beat on the Galties, this is the result of 200 proof WOU-WOU. There are private schools that cost 15Gs+ that have a 27% vaccination rate.
I was born after the polio vac, but I remember growing up hearing about iron lungs and the Rubella vacc. ads.
Bloody Fools.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@gene108:
Could be a bit high. Replacing rotors is standard now, no one turns them, probably because of liability. If you’ve got enough miles on them, they may be replacing the calipers, which is one of the things that makes the price jump.
ETA: If you hear the grinding, it’s critical and you’ve probably already buggered the rotors. Sorry ’bout that, chief.
ETA2: Just noticed the word “dealership”. This is a routine job for a chain or an independent mechanic and that’ll probably save you ~$150.
The Pale Scot
Pardon, apparently it’s spelled Woo Woo
Silver
@Interrobang:
Yeah, tons of good points, but I think that if you put all the unvaccinated kids in one school (bus the fuckers, who cares if it takes an hour each way) then all the selfish free-rider parents who are banking off herd immunity will think twice.
You’re never going to reach the truly stupid and/or religious anyways, they are a lost cause. Not much you can do about that, since children are basically property.
Mnemosyne
@NancyDarling:
A few people have alluded to it, but they now fold tetanus in with pertussis and diphtheria into the DPT shot, so you get vaccinated for all three when you get your tetanus booster.
I managed to gouge my thumb open with a potato peeler on St. Patrick’s Day in 2011 (yes, I am a walking cliche!) and they gave me a DPT shot at the urgent care clinic because I couldn’t remember when my last tetanus shot was.
Though if getting whooping cough grants you lifetime immunity, I guess I’m okay, because I got it when I was 6 weeks old and (from what I’m told) spent quite a long time in the hospital.