The Great Vaccination Debate

  • There are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines. (Photo by Bill Branson, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:

Transcript

Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:

Heather Waltz has a five month old daughter. Most Americans her age have already started a series of vaccinations – to prevent everything from Hepatitis B, to Diphtheria, to Polio.

But Waltz’s little girl isn’t going to get those shots. Her mom worries they could cause things like autism, juvenile diabetes and even cancer.

“I think the jury’s still out, as far as what the research says. But there is enough anecdotal sort of stuff to make me aware and decide that, really, right at this point, vaccinating wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Waltz is among a small, but growing number of parents who are becoming skeptical of vaccines.

Lance Rodewald is director of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control.

He says more than 90% of American children are vaccinated. But there are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines.

“And that’s getting to a rate of lack of protection of children that really can be a fertile ground for the spreading of diseases like measles. And we actually saw that last year.”

In one case last year, Rodewald says a child who wasn’t vaccinated caught the measles in Switzerland and brought it back to Arizona.

“The parents didn’t realize that the child had measles – brought him to the pediatricians office where there were babies that were too young to be vaccinated that got measles. And then that particular outbreak went through four generations of spread, from child to child to child to child before it was able to be contained.”

Measles can cause more than just a nasty rash. In rare cases, it can lead to death. Measles still causes 200,000 deaths around the world. But it’s been almost eradicated in the U.S. because of vaccines.

Rodewald says many parents are concerned about vaccines today because of a ten-year old scientific article that linked the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism. Rodewald says the science in that article proved to be wrong.

“The authors withdrew their names from the article. But this particular study set off a whole series of concerns about vaccines and autism that, to this day, is still talked about.”

Rodewald says many studies have been done and found no association, no cause and effect, between vaccines and autism.

It’s tough for parents to wade through all the information that’s out there these days. And there are so many vaccines to try to understand. Back in the mid-1990s, children were given 6 vaccines. Today, they’re supposed to get more than twice that many.

Mother Heather Waltz tries to keep up with it all and says she still plans to avoid vaccines.

Waltz: “For every bit of research and every article I find sort of helping me support my point, there’s a million other bits of research and articles saying that I’m a bad parent, or saying that I’m somehow damaging the health of the entire United States by not vaccinating my child. Just this idea that she could be a measles monster and just running around and infecting her classmates with measles or something like that, and that would be a terrible thing.”

Grant: “What do you think when you see that?”

Waltz: “It doesn’t make logical sense to me. Because to me, if you have 30 kids in a classroom, and my one isn’t vaccinated, wouldn’t my child be the one at risk? Not the public’s.”

But even if Waltz’s daughter doesn’t get vaccinated, she’ll probably be safe from these diseases. With so many other kids getting inoculations, most of the U.S. is not fertile ground for them to regain traction.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Online Map of Wildlife Diseases

  • Dr. Robert McLean works on a West Nile disease project at the National WIldlife Health Center with a Carolina Chickadee (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There’s a new online map for tracking
wildlife diseases that threaten animals and
people. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

There’s a new online map for tracking
wildlife diseases that threaten animals and
people. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Diseases such as West Nile Virus, Chronic Wasting Disease, Avian Flu, and
others are now often in the news. A website partly developed by the US
Geological Survey aims to track reports of the disease outbreaks around the
world.

Veterinarian Josh Dein leads the project. He says he hopes both health care
professionals and the general public use the online map.

“One of the things you can do is say ‘what’s happening in my neighborhood,
what’s happening in my state, my country?’ And maybe I’m traveling to
someplace else. Maybe I want to look to see what’s happening somewhere else.”

Dein says the map also allows people to narrow their search to specific countries, types of
disease and affected species.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Is Our Water Too Clean?

Diseases caused by contaminated water are common in the developing world, but they’re also making a comeback in the United States where the water might be too clean. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Charity Nebbe
explains:

Transcript

Diseases caused by contaminated water are common in the developing
world, but they’re also making a comeback in the United States where
the water might be too clean. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Charity Nebbe has more:


In 1993, the water-borne pathogen Cryptosporidium claimed 54 lives in
Milwaukee. Incidents of that magnitude are rare, but outbreaks of
water-borne pathogens are increasingly common.


Floyd Frost is an epidemiologist at Lovelace Respiratory Research
Institute in New Mexico and he believes the increase in disease is
linked to improvement in water purification technology. As evidence he
points to his research, published in The Journal of Infectious
Diseases, that shows lower incidence of disease in communities that
drink surface water…


“Perhaps the low dose exposures in surface water are immunizing
people so that they don’t get sick, whereas in the ground water it’s
relatively clean most of the time, but when contamination occurs people
get much sicker.”


Frost believes that to prevent future outbreaks water treatment
facilities need to focus on preventing plant failures rather than
improving purification.


For the GLRC, I’m Charity Nebbe.

Related Links

Doctors Urge Kyoto Sign-On

Some physicians are concerned about the United States not attending the final talks on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming held in early November. The physicians say global warming is already a problem and is adding to a number of public health threats. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Some physicians are concerned about the United States not attending the final talks on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming held in early November. The physicians say global warming is already a problem and is adding to a number of public health threats. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.


Some physicians believe the increase in infectious disease outbreaks such as West Nile virus, Lyme disease, and Hantavirus are connected to global warming. They say the warming already seen contributes to the spread of the viruses. The warming also could be causing more volatile weather –such as sudden storms in some parts of the Great Lakes region. That can cause flooding of sewer systems that lead to illnesses. Bob Musil is the Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He says the group is encouraging politicians to upgrade sewer systems to cope with the changes.


“There are sudden storm surges, sudden precipitation leads to flooding in combined sewage and storm drains. In the state of Michigan in our report we discussed this problem. And we actually, as physicians, go and talk to the responsible officials.”


But the physician’s group says adapting to the changes only treats the symptoms. Musil says the long-term problem can only be dealt with by reducing air pollutants that cause global warming, something the group says the U-S is refusing to do right now. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Lester Graham.

Preparing for Bioterrorism

State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck has more:

Transcript

State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck reports…


As the nation tries to recover from the terrorist attacks in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington DC, infectious disease experts are using the tragedies to highlight that the nation’s skies and borders are not the only things the federal government needs to worry about. Those experts say the nation needs to also start preparing for a bioterrorist attack. The University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm is one of the leading experts on infectious disease and bioterrorism in the nation. He says it’s unlikely that a terrorist is equipped at this time to release a deadly disease like anthrax or small pox. But he says the events on Tuesday, September 11th have redefined terrorism in the United States. And he says the country is currently ill equipped to handle a biological outbreak.


“We’re a country right now, that if we have a slight increase of influenza cases in the wintertime we close down our hospitals because we have no excess capacity, we don’t have the health care workers or the beds. Now you tell me, given that backdrop, what it will mean when 250 or 300,000 or 400,000 people suddenly come down with smallpox or anthrax.”


Osterholm says if those biologic agents, or others like them are released in an American city, it could, over time, make thousands of people sick. And he says the highly contagious diseases would rapidly transfer from person to person, making it difficult for doctors and public health officials to contain the outbreak. On top of that, Osterholm says most such diseases wouldn’t show their symptoms for 3 or four days. He says that could stretch the state’s public health departments thin as they try to track down who’s infected and who’s not.


“We run much of public health in this country on what I would call the equivalent of running O’Hare air traffic control tower on tin cans and string. Yet that’s going to be the system that’s going to respond to bioterrorism.”


Osterholm and others are lobbying the federal government to allocate billions of dollars to improve the community response rates of public health and emergency personnel throughout the country. He also says the country needs to start stockpiling vaccines for smallpox and anthrax. Since the last human case of small pox was eradicated in 1979,
Osterholm says officials haven’t seen the need to continue vaccinating against the disease. Anthrax, on the other hand, has a vaccine but can also be treated with antibiotics if the disease is caught early enough.


The threat of a bioterrorist attack is not only worrying public health officials but also the emergency room doctors who will be treating infected patients. In addition to running the risk of contracting the same infections they’re treating, emergency room doctors say the threat of bioterrorism adds to an already busy schedule of treating cuts, gashes and gun shot wounds. Now physicians, like Pat Lilja who works at North Memorial Medical Center in the Twin Cities, say they have to watch out for rare illnesses as well; for instance, rare flu-like cases in the summer.


“You don’t know about it until people three or four or five days later suddenly start coming into hospitals sick. So you don’t have this big, all of a sudden, something’s going on. What you have to rely upon are your hospitals, primarily your emergency departments, to say we’ve seen twenty patients today all with this same problem and we usually see one a month.”


Lilja and other emergency room physicians’ say they’ve been conducting mock drills of biological and chemical disasters to prepare for any outbreaks. But he says the emergency plans at many hospitals are stuck on the dusty shelves of an administrator too worried about a declining budget rather than an event that they think could never occur. That worries Randall Larson, the director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security in Virginia. He says hospitals need to increase their security and monitoring methods to make sure they catch any outbreak that does occur.


“We mad e a decision in this country that we didn’t want the federal government or the state government running our hospitals. They’re private corporations. Thirty percent of them are in the red today. Fifty percent of our teaching hospitals are in the red. They don’t have time to do the exercises and the training they need to be prepared to respond to a biological or a chemical attack. They got to just keep the doors open and stay out of the red.”


Larsen and others say the new federal office of Homeland Security needs to make bioterrorism a priority in the coming years. He says the FBI, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and doctors need to coordinate their efforts to make sure they respond quickly to a biological or chemical outbreak. He says the responsiveness is just as critical for those who work in public health as the quickness expected from a police officer or a firefighter. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tom Scheck.