CityView Magazine

Your Health The strife over shots By Dr. Lenny Salzberg and autism, some parents are refusing shots for their young children, calling it a private and personal decision. But most physicians strongly P disagree – they say our country relies on “herd immunity” to protect the most vulnerable (children included) from the deadliest diseases. What if you knew that a disease was highly contagious, infecting 90 percent of close contacts before anything could be done about it? A disease like this would spread like wildfire in a daycare. What if symptoms included a high fever, sometimes as high as 105 degrees? A fever that high in a child between six months and 3 years of age can trigger a seizure. And what if you knew that one in five children who contracts this disease will develop a complication or that one in 1,000 will develop encephalitis and two will die from it? The disease is measles. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was extremely common in the United States with 400,000 to 763,094 new cases every year. The measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine was introduced in 1963. Between 2000 and 2007, there were fewer than 116 cases per year. But some health advocates believe rates could be on the rise, and many of them point to vaccine refusal as one cause. In the first third of 2008 (the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control) there were already 64 confirmed cases of measles. Most of these cases were caused by an “index” patient coming from another country with the CityViewNC.com | 55 erhaps no parenting debate is as fierce as the one raging right now over childhood vaccines. Convinced of a link between certain vaccines

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