Just How Protected Against Measles Are We Anyway?

Measles incidence in the United States is at a record low, and indigenous transmission has been interrupted in each year since 1996, suggesting that measles is no longer endemic.

As part of national initiatives, the United States established a goal to eliminate measles by the year 2000. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted a six-year study of more than 20,000 people older than six years old to see how we measured up to this goal.

Guess what they found? Overall the prevalence of measles immunity was 93%.

BUT if you were born before 1957 you were virtually guaranteed to be immune to measles.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is so convinced of this data that it actually defines an potentially measles prone person as someone born after 1956 who has no documentation of adequate vaccination or laboratory evidence of immunity to measles or documentation of physician-diagnosed measles.

Medscape General Medicine January 24, 2001
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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

Any idea what happened in 1957? That is when they started giving the measles vaccine. SO, if you did not get the vaccine you are virtually guaranteed to be immune to measles. After 43 years of giving measles immunizations the degree of protection to society has actually declined 6%!

It is actually worse than that as those born from 1967 to 1976 were only 81% protected. This may be related to giving the vaccine at an older age. The researchers speculate that this is due lower vaccination coverage among children before the implementation of school immunization requirements. But there is no way to know if it was not just due to vaccine failure.

Before measles vaccines were licensed in the United States in 1963, more than 500,000 cases occurred each year. Today, several decades later, the number of measles cases is at an all-time low of 100 cases reported in 1999, and surveillance data suggest that indigenous transmission has been interrupted in each year since 1996, suggesting that measles is no longer an endemic disease in the United States.

It is quite obvious that the protection against measles has declined dramatically since they immunizations were implemented. However so has the incidence of measles. Kids are just not getting measles anymore. Are there any down sides to that?

Well the incidence of asthma is up 250% in this country in the last 20 years. Some speculate that this may be related to the decrease in childhood infections. It is thought that the high fevers we get as a child actually build and strengthen our immune system and prevent the development of complications of asthma.

Dr. Incao wrote an absolutely brilliant piece on this concept which I posted last month.

One could make a justification for the MMR vaccine if in fact it were completely without side effects. Unfortunately, this is just simply not the case. The vaccines manufacturers are notorious for not doing adequate safety studies. Their efficacy studies are superb, they can prove the vaccines work, but they can NOT and have NOT proved that they are safe.

Last week's newsletter had an article describing how Dr. Andrew Wakefield has associated 170 cases of autism with the MMR vaccine.

Michael Belkin would like to see a comparison of autoimmune diseases, neurological damage, autism and diabetes for pre and post vaccine era populations.

He also believes the CDC epidemiologists have never considered that they are causing the same exact thing they are taking credit for eliminating (neurological complications from the measles virus) by injecting it into babies. The co-inventor of the measles vaccine (Dr. Sam Katz) admitted as much in a NYC lecture last year "With measles vaccine it is possible that maybe one out of 150,000 children who get the vaccine may get something that mimics measles encephalitis." The peer-reviewed, published data showing it's only 1 in 150,000 and not one in a few hundred does not exist.

Related Articles:

Finnish Study Attempts to Confirm MMR Safety

Testimony to Committee on Government Reform, US Congress

(Click on Andrew Wakefield...by far the best single reference I've found)

Increase in Incidence of Autism (Dr. Edward Yazbak)

The autism increase: research needed on the vaccine connection (Bernard Rimland)

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