Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/10/11/whooping-cough-a-comeback-story-nobody-loves.html
Whooping Cough: A Comeback Story Nobody Loves
Paranoid parents hasten the return of a highly Contagious disease
By Elijah Wolfson
Epidemiologists did their best to warn everyone, but too many people had their own ideas. Now it's happening: The highly contagious and potentially fatal disease pertussis, also known as whooping cough ? practically eradicated in the United States until just a few years ago ? is making a virulent comeback. Medical researchers know why it's spreading, and they know how to stop it. The trouble is that so many people refuse to listen to them.
A newly published study in the official journal Pediatrics lays out the facts behind the resurgence. Its root cause is a persistent epidemic of misinformation about vaccines, which is leading parents to decline to have their children immunized. The study focuses on a dramatic 2010 outbreak in California, where the number of reported whooping cough cases soared to 9,120, including 10 infant deaths. It was the state's worst eruption of the disease in more than 60 years, and fully nine times the total recorded across the entire United States in 1976, when a concerted immunization program had all but wiped out the pathogen...
Whooping Cough: A Comeback Story Nobody Loves
Paranoid parents hasten the return of a highly Contagious disease
By Elijah Wolfson
Epidemiologists did their best to warn everyone, but too many people had their own ideas. Now it's happening: The highly contagious and potentially fatal disease pertussis, also known as whooping cough ? practically eradicated in the United States until just a few years ago ? is making a virulent comeback. Medical researchers know why it's spreading, and they know how to stop it. The trouble is that so many people refuse to listen to them.
A newly published study in the official journal Pediatrics lays out the facts behind the resurgence. Its root cause is a persistent epidemic of misinformation about vaccines, which is leading parents to decline to have their children immunized. The study focuses on a dramatic 2010 outbreak in California, where the number of reported whooping cough cases soared to 9,120, including 10 infant deaths. It was the state's worst eruption of the disease in more than 60 years, and fully nine times the total recorded across the entire United States in 1976, when a concerted immunization program had all but wiped out the pathogen...