The measles vaccine, which was developed by Maurice Hilleman in the 1960s and licensed in 1963, is estimated to save the lives of one million people around the world each year.
Since the vaccination’s approval, measles cases in North America have plummeted from nearly 800,000 cases in the U.S. alone in 1958 to eradication.
In Canada, measles killed up to 75 people every year and sent thousands to hospital. In 2005, Canada had six reported cases.
From 2003-05, there were no measles cases in Alberta, but the disease has made its way back to the Western Hemisphere, and the reason, experts say, is due to people not getting vaccinated for the highly contagious virus that infects the respiratory and immune systems and the skin.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) declared a measles outbreak April 29 for the Calgary, Central and Edmonton zones. At present, there have been 22 measles cases confirmed – nine in Calgary, seven in Central Alberta and six in Edmonton.
Rocky View Schools does not make it mandatory for its students to be vaccinated for measles, but, as its director of communications indicated, they ‘take the lead’ from AHS, much like all school authorities in Alberta.
Any student, however, who has been exposed to the measles virus is not permitted to attend a school or day care for the period of time starting five days after first exposure through 21 days after the last exposure to a case of measles.
The measles vaccine is offered in Alberta at no charge, so, in a nutshell, there is no reasonable excuse for not getting vaccinated.
Alberta’s chief medical officer, Dr. James Talbot, said in a media release sent to the Eagle that the last person to die from measles in Alberta was in 1988, explaining, “This dramatic decrease in mortality rates is not because these life-threatening diseases have been eradicated. They’re still here. What’s protecting us is Alberta’s rigorous immunization program.”
There are always, however, those who believe there is some kind of conspiracy theory going on, especially when it comes to money, politics and pharmaceutical companies.
One of the issues they point to is autism.
Despite a multitude of scientific studies revealing that there is no link between vaccinations and autism (including this one from The Journal of Pediatrics – http://jpeds.com/webfiles/images/journals/ympd/JPEDSDeStefano.pdf) there remain some who are anti-vaccination.
Celebrity/actress Jenny McCarthy is a perfect example of how misinformation can be dangerous.
McCarthy had sited a paper by Andrew Wakefield, whose study was the reason behind the anti-vaccine movement and the scare that they were linked to autism.
It has since been revealed Wakefield’s paper was based on manipulated data and fraudulent research, according to the British Medical Journal. Wakefield was banned from practising medicine in the U.K. and his articles were retracted. He was even accused of attempting to profit from his vaccine scare.
In October of last year, McCarthy, after years of advocating against vaccines, stated that she was ‘not at all against vaccines.’
Diseases like the measles rely on misinformation and people who are not vaccinated, because it is those people who put others at risk…like infants under the age of one who cannot yet get the measles vaccination, as their immune systems may not yet be strong enough to fight off the live attenuated vaccine.
A live attenuated vaccine is one that has been reduced in strength, but is still live. The immune system is introduced to the virus and is able to fight it off. The next time the body is exposed to that same virus, it remembers it and is able to attack it and kill it quickly.
For those who don’t get the measles vaccine, or are unable to because they are not yet old enough, some possible complications of the virus include: diarrhea, ear infection (could cause hearing loss), pneumonia, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), seizures and death.
Children under the age five and adults over 20 are most severely affected by the measles virus…all the more reason to get vaccinated.
This issue is not simply about you…it’s about everyone around you, including those you say you care about.
