MEASLES… HOW?

Graphic by Angeles Ramirez / the Advocate

Vaccinations are one of mankind’s greatest inventions: Polio, smallpox, cholera, and even the measles have been vastly reduced with new vaccine discoveries. However, the latter of those is making a very unexpected comeback: In Southwest Washington, specifically the Vancouver area, an outbreak of the measles virus has spread to several dozen people, with cases popping up in Oregon and other states, such as Texas.

This is really frustrating since measles, like polio or smallpox, is an old disease that modern society has mostly overcome through vaccinations. But we have a strange trend of people not vaccinating their children for fear them developing autism and I’ve never understood the logical reasoning for that. There is no scientific link to this claim, and the only people saying it’s true are celebrities, it seems.

If you aren’t vaccinating your kids, only for them to get an easily curable disease and live through the detriments of that, then what are you doing? Just leaving them to suffer – and maybe even succumb to it.

The more concerning part is how medical research for this is going to go, considering this is a developing situation. More cases are on the rise in other states and it won’t stop anytime soon. This can easily become a small pandemic since cases of the measles are more widespread in parts of Eastern Europe and Africa.

All of this leaves me scratching my head on how we let this happen. It sounds like the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares, letting a borderline, ancient disease evolve and overcome the antibiotics we use to treat it.

However, measles isn’t as strong a disease as the swine flu that popped up a decade ago, and it certainly won’t become the deadly epidemic of the Bubonic Plague.

Considering how fast the CDC (the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) comes up with solutions and inventions, a major measles outbreak wouldn’t likely to be as concerning as, say, the Ebola virus coming to America.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact the we’re talking about the measles right now, when we shouldn’t be. I’ve seen plenty of Twitter jokes about anti-vaxxers, but who would’ve known it would get to CDC levels of seriousness. That in itself should show us that we shouldn’t value celebrity opinions as authority higher than the people who classify the facts. I, you, and many others should listen to doctors researching vaccinations instead of what Jenny McCarthy has to say on the “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

After all: You can doubt medical science all you want, but when it’s flu season we all know the first thing we’ll do is go for that vaccine shot.

Advocate Staff