Texas is at risk of a deadly measles outbreak, and yet few have been willing to cast blame on the st
No doubt about it--the antivax movement is growing! Folks are willing to put their own kids at risk and also other kids. This is dangerous!
Peter Hotez vs. Measles and the Anti-Vaccination Movement
Texas is at risk of a deadly measles outbreak, and yet few have been willing to cast blame on the state’s combative anti-vaccine movement. Enter Peter Hotez, an affable, bow-tie-wearing scientist who decided he’d had enough.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/peter-hotez-vs-measles-and-the-anti-vaccination-movement?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Texas Monthly |
Laura Beil
Peter Hotez. Photograph by Brian Goldman.
One afternoon in October 2016, Peter Hotez holed up in his office at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, where he is the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. Surrounded by obscure science volumes and honors bestowed by dignitaries ranging from Bill Clinton to Greg Abbott, he meticulously set about injecting himself into a battle that most scientists had been careful to avoid. Hotez had spent his career fighting deadly diseases in far-flung corners of the world, but now he began tapping out an essay called “Texas and Its Measles Epidemics” for the scientific journal PLOS Medicine. The modest title belied just how provocative the article would turn out to be.
In it, he recalled the measles outbreaks that had routinely devastated the U.S. before the introduction of a vaccine, in the sixties. The virus killed 6,000 Americans a year in the early twentieth century, and thousands more suffered permanent hearing loss and neurological damage. Globally, it killed millions. Thanks to vaccine campaigns, that number had dipped to under 100,000 by 2013. In the U.S., it was declared eliminated in 2000. Yet as Hotez considered more-recent statistics, he wondered, “Could large-scale measles outbreaks and deaths return to the US?”
He was particularly concerned about Texas. Days earlier, he had been fielding routine emails when a disturbing set of data popped up on his screen: the number of Texas children who had been granted exemptions from school vaccine laws for “reasons of conscience” had increased steadily, year by year, from around 3,000 in 2003 to just under 45,000 in 2015. Until this point, Hotez had watched the state’s anti-vaccine lobby with increasing dread but little urgency. Now a sense of alarm came over him. He was staring at a measles epidemic in the making.
Measles remains one of the most contagious viruses on earth. Studies have shown that populations that dip below 95 percent vaccine coverage become a tinderbox. Hotez noted in his essay that counties in West Texas and the Panhandle were approaching that threshold, and vaccine exemption rates in many Austin-area private schools had already exceeded 20 percent (one had even surpassed 40 percent). “I predict measles outbreaks in Texas could happen as early as the winter or spring of 2018,” he wrote. ..........................................
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