One unvaccinated child was patient zero of a measles epidemic
22nd June 2014
I don’t ordinarily pick up anything from DailyKos, but this attracted my attention.
The problem, at least in the USA, is that those unvaccinated children tend to be clustered in small geographical areas where individuals who share the typical characteristics of many vaccine deniers tend to live.
Love that term: ‘vaccine deniers’.
The complication is that the herd immunity can break down rather quickly when the vaccination uptake drops below 80-90% in these clusters. And all it takes is one person carrying a vaccine preventable disease from an area, where it is endemic, to then start an outbreak or epidemic very quickly in one of these low vaccine uptake clusters.
In evolutionary terms, this would seem to be a self-correcting problem — the offspring of those who are inclined to refuse vaccination get the disease; either they form the same immunity that those of us did who went through it before the vaccine was available, or they die, thereby removing their offspring from the gene pool.
Maybe I’m missing something….