Summary
A measles outbreak in rural West Texas has surged to 49 confirmed cases, mostly among unvaccinated school-age children, with officials suspecting hundreds more unreported infections.
The outbreak is centered in Gaines County, home to a large Mennonite population with low vaccination rates. Despite CDC support, Texas has not requested federal intervention.
The outbreak has now spread to Lubbock, raising wider public health concerns.
Experts warn it could persist for months without increased vaccination efforts, but skepticism toward vaccines remains a significant barrier.
Might have to start building walls around the areas where idiots are giving each other preventable diseases.
The part that sucks in all of this: the children who died didn’t choose to not get the vaccine. Their parents did.
They might not die. They might just go blind or dead or have brain damage.
But no autism! Cause that’s wOrSt PoSsIbLe thing!
As the parent of an autistic child, I’d much rather him be alive and autistic than killed by a completely preventative means.
Of course, that doesn’t even matter because vaccines don’t fucking cause autism.
My God. If only there was some sort of preventative measure they could have taken!
remember who did this. it’s not over.
I hope some day we can invent some sort of treatment that could prevent kids from ever getting this disease.
Like why don’t they just make something that makes the disease not hurt us and then put it in our bodies… Why do they have to have all this lab processed shit that they don’t actually know what it does and try to put it in our bodies…
You know what’s interesting is that the first real anti-vaxxers started because old vaccines would use pus from an infected cow. Something about it being unholy worship of cow or some nonsense.
Now the anti-vaxx crowd is all crying about synthetics… Can’t make anyone happy.
The truly OG anti-vaxxers had some among them that thought it was against their god’s will to combat disease, if you can fucking believe it (people are stupid and horrible, it turns out):
https://newrepublic.com/article/121000/puritanical-roots-anti-vaxxer-movement-go-back-300-years
To treat small pox was seen as a form of blasphemy—a moral evil that refused to recognize that epidemics were acts of God.
I just don’t understand how such a “god” could be worthy of worship, then. Imagine losing 9 children before they reached adulthood. I’d flip this “god” of theirs the bird, and try the cure, thankyouveryfuckingmuch.
So from what lemmy is reporting, we know West Texas has a measles outbreak and some giant fracking earthquake to contend with. Maybe toss in some radioactive exposure from a now-unmonitored nuclear facility and we’ve got the makings of a superhero origin story.
Roadkill RFK will be harvesting their dead for food. Allegedly.
Good thing everyone I know is vaccinated.
Vaccines aren’t anywhere near 100% effective, they rely on herd immunity which means enough people have to have the vaccine so the disease can’t get a foothold and goes extinct.
While they might not be 100% effective, but 99% or even 90% are good enough to stop a disease from getting a problem.
How bad are the measles, really? Asking because I was born in the 1st fucking world and never met anyone under a 100 that met someone with it.
We think of measles as a minor viral infection of kids that causes fever, rash, and a runny nose, and goes away without major complications. Unfortunately, that is not always so. Nervous system disease is a particular problem. SSPE occurs as a late, fatal measles complication in one out of 1,367 cases of measles in children younger than 5. One out of 1,000 children with measles gets an infection of the brain (encephalitis) early in the course of measles. About 15% of children with measles encephalitis die. Measles encephalitis led to the death of the writer Roald Dahl’s daughter Olivia.
Children’s brains can also develop an allergic reaction to the measles virus several weeks after infection. This is called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). Children seem to recover, then get fever, confusion, headaches, and neck stiffness. Like SSPE and measles encephalitis, ADEM occurs in about one out of 1,000 cases of measles. It is fatal in 10% to 20% of patients. Survivors of measles encephalitis and ADEM often have epilepsy, brain damage, or developmental delay.
Measles has other serious complications. During pregnancy, it causes miscarriages. Measles can infect the cornea, and was once a common cause of blindness. Ear infections and hearing loss are frequent. Measles virus also infects the lungs, causing pneumonia in 3% to 4% of cases. Measles weakens the immune system for at least two months. Sometimes patients die of other infections immediately after they recover from measles. In a measles epidemic that killed more than 3,000 soldiers in the US Army in 1917–18, bacterial pneumonia was the major cause of death.
Measles: The forgotten killer - John Ross, MD, FIDSA, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing
