Brooklyn Orthodox Jews See Spike in Measles Cases
Six cases of childhood measles have been reported in Brooklyn over the last two weeks, the New York City health department said Friday, contributing to a spike in measles cases this year.
The health department usually sees four to six cases of measles per year in years when there are no outbreaks, said Susan Craig, a spokeswoman for the department. There were recent outbreaks in 2008, when there were 30 cases, and 2009, with 18 cases. Last year there were six cases. So far this year, there have been 24 cases. Many of the cases this year have been among travelers and were not linked together.
The latest outbreak took place within a close-knit Orthodox Jewish population in Brooklyn, officials said. There have been similar outbreaks among Orthodox Jews in the past. Some of the children had not been vaccinated, perhaps because of a preference within the community to delay vaccination, health officials said.
At least two of the cases are directly related, and it is suspected that all are related, “with unknown common exposures,” Ms. Craig said.
She said the health department had put out an alert to doctors because it is the middle of a Jewish holiday season, raising the risk that children may be exposed to measles through large gatherings and holiday parties.
“Measles is a highly infectious and potentially life-threatening disease,” Dr. Jay Varma, the city’s deputy commissioner for disease control, said in an e-mail Friday. “Because it is so easily transmitted from one person to another, we continue to see outbreaks in communities where parents delay vaccinating their children.”
Children are supposed to routinely receive the first dose of measles vaccination at 12 months and the second dose at 4 to 6 years old.
Proctect Your Children
when will the Rabbonim come out with a Kol Korei to vaccinate? when will mosdos and yeshivos refuse to accept these kids? what a perversion for an orthodox jew to not vaccinate in the name of religion? haven’t you ppl heard of v’neshmartem meod es nafshoseichem?! the studies against vaccinations are bogus. no medicine is 100% safe but measles is deadly, so whats the obvious choice?
Crown Hieghts Mom
anybody know which community? The picture is not necessarily representative of which “ultra-orthodox” community is affected
Liora
WHY are parents not getting their kids vaccinated????? Measles is highly contagious and completley preventable! Parents need to be educated and responsible… gimme a break..
Yehudis
I’m not sure what it will take to push everyone to vaccinate their kids (and on time to boot). Over the past few years I’ve been hearing many excuses from parents who choose not to: it causes Autism (let’s not go there, this has been proven ridiculous already), there are too many vaccines given to children at once (doctors give these vaccines at their suggested times because of reasons such as this Measles outbreak), some children react adversely (fevers, etc… which is worse, really?), etc. I usually choose to keep quiet as I feel that everyone should “live and let live,” but now the selfish decisions of these parents are affecting the greater communities.
A few statistics to think about (taken from a number of credible sources including the American Academy of Pediatrics, The International Polio Network, etc):
*An unvaccinated child is 35 times more likely to ch’v contract Measles than a vaccinated child.
*For those who are scared of the HIGHLY unlikely risk of a vaccination causing encephalopathy: the chance of a child ch’v contracting encephalopathy from the Measles vaccine is 1 in 1,000,000; whereas the chance of a child ch’v contracting it from the actual Measles virus is 1 in 1,000. You do the math.
Just to throw in a few Polio stats (seeing is there have been outbreaks in certain parts of the world):
*There were 57,879 cases of Polio in the U.S. in 1952 (the vaccine came out in 1956).
*There were 1,312 cases of Polio in the U.S. in 1961 – such a decline in only 6 years.
*There were 0 (ZERO) cases of Polio in the U.S. in 2002. Again, you do the math.
Please, become informed about the risks of not vaccinating your children, and even delaying vaccinations. Vaccines created a healthier world for all our children and iy”H we can continue that by choosing to do the smart and responsible thing for our families and the world at large.
vaccinate!
duh!!!
DaasTorah
Measels=orchitis (testicular inflammation) which leads to sterility and subfertility in a certain percentage. Do you really want to make your sons unable to have children?
In the Know
Schools should not accept children who are not vaccinated. In some cases it
can be detrimental to teachers who are pregnant.
hmm
education is certainly needed.
if you want to count yourself as educated, go to medical literature (such as pubmed.gov) and search ‘fredderick klenner’. also, google ‘thomas levy md’
then start with your statistics.
you guys make me laf
….or feel bad for you.
when is the last time that you’ve studied medical literature?
Some who got sick were vaccinated
It states some were un-vaccinated, however, you can infer that some were vaccinated! So, how can it be that your holy-grail of vaccination didn’t protect from measles??
Measles is a 10 day sickness with fever that 99.9 percent of kids suffer no complications. The same is true of the common cold. However, since they found a “cure” for measles and need to sell the cure, they need to make measles sound worse than it really is.
Oh, and if you will blame the vaccinated kids getting sick from the unvaccinated kids, doesn’t that prove the ineffectiveness of vaccines? Then why when people travel to other countries do people get vaccinated? I thought it was because vaccinations help in the face of an unvaccinated population.
Be smart: Don’t vaccinate!! Vaccinations cause your child’s brain to swell lie a balloon and press against the skull (admitted side effect, read the vaccines insert). Doesn’t that sound risky just to have the same chance of not getting measles and mumps as a placebo?
Educate yourselves people!
Milhouse
#8, if you want people to search for someone by name you should make sure to spell it correctly! Frederick (one D) Klenner was a nutcase whose theories did not produce results and have been rejected by everyone whose opinion counts, but at least he was notable enough to score a WP page; Thomas Levy isn’t even that. So why should anyone pay attention to either of them? In any case, what have either of them got to do with the urgent need to vaccinate children against measles?
#1, nobody doesn’t vaccinate “in the name of religion”. People don’t vaccinate their children because they’ve been convinced by charlatans who claim that vaccines are harmful, and they should instead dose their children with vitamins or patent medicines. In particular, there is a common rumor that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine causes autism; this rumor was deliberately started by one charlatan for the purpose of launching a lucrative career as an expert witness in trials against vaccine manufacturers. As a result of this one person’s attempt to make money, tens of thousands of children have been deprived of the vaccine, and many catch one or more of these three diseases.
There are probably no more non-vaccinators in our community than in any other, but the ones in our community have more children, so they show up disproportionately in the statistics.
Rofeh Chol Basar
To Number 8
Thank you for your advice to research Drs. Klenner and Levy. Apparently (based on Dr. Levy’s website and Dr. Klenner’s papers in Pubmed) both were very interested in using vitamin C to treat a plethora of diseases.
This has nothing to do with vaccination.
People, vaccinate your kids, it saves lives!
Milhouse
#10, oy vey. Everyone knows that vaccines are not 100% effective. But nor are they anything like 0% effective, as your diseased (perhaps unvaccinated) mind would like to pretend. The measles vaccine works very much better than placebos — if it didn’t it would never have been allowed to be introduced in the first place. That is the standard for normal medicines; it’s your “alternative” patent medicines and snake-oil remedies that are not tested against placebos, and can be marketed even when there is no evidence at all that they do any good at all, and some evidence that they do harm.
By encouraging people not to vaccinate their children you are shofech domim; how will you account to the Beis Din Shel Maaloh?
Dania
In response to the person who said “educate yourselves people!” let me first say that I have been educated. I am a pediatric critical care (ICU) physician. That translates to 8 years of education (4 years college, 4 medical school), three years of residency training during which I saw thousands of children (and thankfully vaccinated almost every child who came through my clinic) and three years of pediatric ICU training. I see many children in the ICU who make me sad but none are sadder to me than those who are in the ICU suffering from diseases that could have been prevented. I am thankful to be practicing in an era of vaccines. It is painful enough for me to watch children die from complications of congenital heart disease and cancer. I am thankful to not have to watch children die from complications of infectious diseases that are preventable by vaccines. I am thankful to be learning from people who saw firsthand the devastating effects of polio, measles, hemophilus influenza, meningococcemia. I myself took care of a child last year who was almost dead from pneumonia caused by superinfection of influenza virus. These diseases are real and they are scary. Some of them kill children instantly and others such as varicella can be benign but can also lead to devastating results.
You are all right that there are side effects to vaccines. Vaccines are medications and all medications have side effects. What you should do as an educated parent is to compare benefits and risks of vaccinations. If you look at all the facts, it is clear that children are more likely to suffer a side effect from the diseases that vaccines protect from than from the vaccine itself. Where can you find these facts? what should you believe? well, a reasonable person would likely place his/her faith in people such as myself who are educated or perhaps in organizations such as the American Association of Pediatrics, an organization whose sole purpose is dedicated to the preservation of the health of all children. Anybody can make anything up. What I find fascinating is how many people listen to people who have no authority to speak. In this case, misinformation is far more dangerous than ignorance.
On a side note, mumps causes orchitis, inflammation of the testes. This leads to infertility only in rare cases.
Marc
I know the family that has 2 kids with measles! For all the people that are complaining ….one of the kids has allergy’s so they couldn’t take the vaccines !