Measles Attacks! Vaccination skeptics have given new life to an old disease. Measles is hot again. First the good news: a recent World Health Organization report found that, worldw

Measles Attacks!

Vaccination skeptics have given new life to an old disease.

Measles is hot again. First the good news: a recent World Health Organization report found that, worldwide, 9.6 million lives were saved in the last decade because of redoubled vaccine efforts. But here in the Unites States, measles is on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. saw more measles in 2011 than at any time since 1995. Usually the U.S. has about 60 annual cases: last year it had 222.

Measles is on the rise in the U.S. for the exact opposite reason it is dropping globally. Here, as well as in Europe and other resource‐rich places, many people hate vaccination. Almost all of the 2011 U.S. cases developed in or were spread by unvaccinated Americans traveling to Europe and elsewhere, or about‐to‐be‐sick travelers visiting the U.S. from abroad.

Many refuseniks cite side effects as their primary concern, yet their worry does not diminish when such connections are disproved, as with autism. Nor does the reappearance of a near‐vanquished infection in undervaccinated communities ring a reality‐based bell.

For these folks, and their 200‐year‐old forebears, vaccines are bad because they are not “natural”. This is true, but isn’t the point of civilization to rise above the blunt cruelty of nature? To arrive at some higher ground where we, and not Mother Nature, can call a few shots? Those wanting pure nature might prefer to watch a lion shred a wildebeest for lunch, or chase a tornado as it levels mobile homes in Oklahoma. That’s nature at its purest: disinterested, timeless, unfazed by suffering.

(Newsweek. May 7, 2012. p. 9.)

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