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ghosttruck

Level 57 Taco Wizard
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Three years ago, Joshua Nerius, a 30-year-old software product manager in Chicago, developed a high fever and a rash. Doctors prescribed antibiotics, but Nerius just got sicker and sicker.

Joshua went to the emergency room, where a doctor said it looked a lot like the measles. Had he been vaccinated as a child?

Nerius texted the question to his mother. She sent back a thumbs-down emoji.


His next stop was an isolation room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Nerius became so weak that at one point, he couldn't walk without assistance. He lost 25 pounds. It took months to fully recover.

"I felt horrible," he said. "It took a serious toll."

He thinks about the current measles outbreak, which started in Washington state, where dozens of children have suffered because their parents chose not to vaccinate them.

He knows that their suffering -- and his own three years ago -- could have been avoided.

"It makes me so angry. My parents thought they were doing the right thing. They were persuaded by the anti-vaxers," he said.

Nerius is something of a unicorn: a living adult who experienced measles recently and can describe what it feels like.

It's easy to forget how sick people get from measles or how it killed 400 to 500 people in the United States each year before the vaccine came into use in 1963, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Measles is out of sight and out of mind, so we think it's no big deal, as Bill Shine's wife has said," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

 
In the 90's, there was a news special about the rise of polio in the USA. It had been so well eradicated that people seemed to think it didn't exist and vaccination unnecessary. A father said he couldn't bear to see his 4 yr old cry so didn't get her shots. Of course, after she got POLIO, she cried a lot more than a prick from a needle.
He never said he regretted not getting her vaccinated. He made excuses. I know these things are tightly edited, but if he had shown remorse, surely they would have shown that.
 
Who imparts huge medical info, with such impact, with a fucking emoji?
That tells me that mom still had no regrets and strong anti vax opinions when her son first contacted the disease. The victim is understandably forgiving of his parents, he loves them and wants to find excuses.
But how does mom feel today about vaccinations after witnessing her son's long road to recovery and knowing his alarm at how he might have spread contagion?
Baby Boomers. :p

Boomers are the trendy scapegoats these days.
 
But how does mom feel today about vaccinations after witnessing her son's long road to recovery and knowing his alarm at how he might have spread contagion?

She probably feels fine because her son didn’t turn out autistic. Every time one of these troglodytes don’t end up with autistic children, well, to them, it just validates their nonsense.
 
In the 90's, there was a news special about the rise of polio in the USA. It had been so well eradicated that people seemed to think it didn't exist and vaccination unnecessary. A father said he couldn't bear to see his 4 yr old cry so didn't get her shots. Of course, after she got POLIO, she cried a lot more than a prick from a needle.
He never said he regretted not getting her vaccinated. He made excuses. I know these things are tightly edited, but if he had shown remorse, surely they would have shown that.

I was a Navy brat and the local base required all families to get vaccinations. They would have dates set up for certain vaccinations at their medical facility and families lined up to get shots. I was petrified every time we had to go. So when the polio vaccinations were set up. I remember the line of people looked miles long (I was a kid...) and getting all worked up about the anticipated painful shot. But when I got to the table, they were passing out the vaccine in sugar cubes. :) I was ecstatic, to say the least!
 
If there were a link between autism and vaccination, I would choose an autistic child who was immune to various communicable diseases over a neurotypical child who died as a result of one of these diseases. Full stop.

Various actors and actresses know better than people who have studied this subject matter for decades, though, so they are the authorities.

:penguin: <- sardonic little shit, ain't he

--Al
 
This thread should be a repository of all the antivaxxers horror stories.


An unvaccinated 6-year-old Oregon boy was hospitalized for two months for tetanus and almost died of the bacterial illness after getting a deep cut while playing on a farm, according to a case study published Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The child received an emergency dose of the tetanus vaccine in the hospital, but his parents declined to give him a second dose - or any other childhood shots - after he recovered, the paper said.

"When I read that, my jaw dropped. I could not believe it. That's a tragedy and a misunderstanding, and I'm just flabbergasted," said Dr. William Schaffner, an expert in infectious diseases and chair at the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

"This is an awful disease, but ... we have had a mechanism to completely prevent it, and the reason that we have virtually no cases anymore in the United States is because we vaccinate, literally, everyone."

When the boy arrived at the emergency department, his muscle spasms were so severe he could not talk, could not open his mouth and was struggling to breathe, she said.

Unlike measles, which is a virus, someone who has survived a case of tetanus is not immune and can get the illness again if they remain unvaccinated. Tetanus also isn't transmitted person-to-person by sneezing or coughing like the measles, but instead comes from bacterial spores that are found in the environment.

Tetanus spores exist everywhere in the soil. When an unvaccinated person gets a deep, penetrating wound, those spores can invade the cut and begin producing the bacteria that causes the illness.

The tetanus bacterium secretes a toxin that gets into the bloodstream and latches onto the nervous system.

Anywhere from three to 21 days after infection, symptoms appear: muscle spasms, lockjaw, difficulty swallowing and breathing and seizures. The disease can cause death or severe disability in those who survive, Schaffner said.

About 30 people contract tetanus each year nationwide, according to the CDC, and 16 people died of it between 2009 and 2015. It's rare among children; those over 65 are the most vulnerable.

In the case in Oregon, the boy cut himself on the forehead while playing, and his family stitched up the wound themselves. Six days later, he began clenching his jaw, arching his neck and back and had uncontrollable muscle spasms.

When he began to have trouble breathing, his parents called paramedics and he was transported by air to Oregon Health & Science University's Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland. When he arrived, he asked for water but could not open his mouth.

The child was sedated, put on a ventilator and cared for in a darkened room while wearing ear plugs because any stimulation made his pain and muscle spasms worse. His fever spiked to almost 105 degrees (40.5 Celsius), and he developed high blood pressure and a racing heartbeat.

Forty-four days after he was hospitalized, the boy was able to sip clear liquids. Six days later, he was able to walk a short distance with help. After another three weeks of inpatient rehabilitation and a month at home, he could ride a bike and run - a remarkable recovery, experts said.

The child's care - not including the air ambulance and inpatient rehabilitation - cost nearly $1 million, about 72 times the mean for a pediatric hospitalization in the U.S., the paper noted.

"The way to treat tetanus is you have to outlast it. You have to support the patient because this poison links on chemically and then it has to be slowly metabolized," Schaffner said.

Cases of tetanus have dropped by 95 percent in the U.S. since widespread childhood vaccination and adult booster shots became routine nearly 80 years ago; deaths have dropped 99 percent.

The CDC recommends a five-dose series of tetanus shots for children between the ages of 2 months and 6 years and a booster shot every 10 years for adults.

This is absolutely unbelievable. They will also let him get it again and again til he dies from it since they refused to for him to have the rest of the shots.
 
I find it hard to believe that a 30 year old didn't know their vaccination status. That's the biggest crime here. At 30 you should know your medical history.

A lot of people don’t think twice about it because there’s a common myth of “lifetime immunity”. I’m not an immunologist, but I found the immunology portion of medical school to be hard as fuck. The amount of memorization is mind-blowing. Clinical immunology is a relatively new field of medicine and it’s always rapidly developing, so there are a lot of common misconceptions. The Wakefield “study” didn’t help any (fun fact: he worked at U of T for a few years and no one liked him).

From what I remember, it’s actually advised that you complete a titer test every 15 years. This is especially important if you work with high-risk (elderly, children)/immunocompromised individuals. It’s also super important if you’re around any zoonoses.

The 30 y/o probably (erroneously) assumed he was vaccinated as a child and didn’t think anything of it.
 
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