No Shit: Disneyland Measles Outbreak Linked to Anti-Vaxxers

By Kara Brown  |  March 16, 2015 | 6:50pm
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Disneyland has spent the last few months battling a measles outbreak, which scientists have now linked to—wait for it—low vaccination rates. Huh. It’s almost as if diseases that we essentially eradicated will return if children aren’t goddamn vaccinated.

A study, as reported by Live Science, found that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rate for those exposed to the Disneyland outbreak was between 50 and 86 percent. The nation MMR vaccination rate is 92 percent and a rate of 96 to 99 percent is needed to prevent an outbreak.

Scientists, as well as those with a cursory understanding of science and common sense, suspected that the outbreak was most likely due to low vaccination rates. And now, research has found exactly that.

In the analysis, which is published online today (March 16) in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers created a mathematical model using
data from both the official measles case counts collected by the California Department of Public Health during the outbreak, and media-reported case counts.
By using these two data sources, researchers were able to capture the transmission of the virus as the measles outbreak spread beyond California. The CDC currently reports that there have been cases in seven other states, as well as in two neighboring countries (Mexico and Canada) linked to the Disneyland outbreak since the start of the year.

The author of the study, Maimuna Majumder of Boston Children’s Hospital, links the Disneyland outbreak to the rise of the anti-vaccine movement.

“The 2015 Disneyland outbreak is quite possibly a direct consequence of the growing anti-vaccination movement in the United States,” she said.
This new analysis affirms, with better mathematical precision, that the major sources of new measles cases are U.S. children who have not been vaccinated, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who was not involved in the research.


Just as everyone as been saying
over and over, these selfish, delusional parents who refuse to vaccinate their children despite decades of scientific research and proof—like the fact that nobody gets the fucking measles anymore—are singlehandedly going to bring back problems that we had already solved through a vaccine so effective that it eliminated measles from the entire Western Hemisphere. Cool.

Image via Getty.

 
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