Darla Shine doesn't get it. Childhood illnesses of old are no joke.

[Eugene]

Earlier thread: Wife of White House communications chief goes on anti-vaccine tirade

______________________________________________________________________

Source: Washington Post

Darla Shine doesn’t get it. Childhood illnesses of old are no joke.

By Bethany Mandel February 19 at 5:04 PM
Bethany Mandel is an editor for Ricochet and a stay-at-home mother.

Everyone has nostalgia for parts of our childhoods: spending summer days from sunrise to sunset outside playing with neighborhood kids, grandma’s cooking, television shows and movies. But last week Darla Shine, the wife of the White House communications director, expressed nostalgia for a strange part of her childhood: the diseases we now have vaccines for.

Shine wrote on Twitter that “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids.” She added: “I had the #Measles #Mumps #ChickenPox as a child and so did every kid I knew — Sadly my kids had #MMR so they will never have the life long natural immunity I have. Come breathe on me!” Shine is correct that many baby boomers alive today had all of these diseases. Unfortunately, there are boomers who aren’t alive today precisely because they didn’t have access to the lifesaving science of vaccines.

Was life before vaccines really so carefree, and were these diseases really so inconsequential? It’s impossible to travel back in time, but one can step on a plane and, in under a day, be transported to places where vaccines are not nearly so universally available. Nine years ago, I did just this, spending the year in rural Cambodia teaching fifth grade gifted students. It was in Southeast Asia where I became a passionate defender of the importance of vaccines, because I witnessed the ravages of these diseases firsthand.

The first of these vaccine-preventable diseases I encountered was the mumps. At an orphanage I visited, I met several children spread out on rugs in one of the common areas hooked up to IVs filled with coconut water. At first, I had no idea what I was seeing, so thoroughly has mumps been eradicated in the United States: My guide had to explain what was making the orphans so ill.

While I had seen many cases of dengue fever and malaria in my time there, the mumps was frighteningly different. ...

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/darla-shine-doesnt-get-it-childhood-illnesses-of-old-are-no-joke/2019/02/19/d48abca2-3477-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html

[dawg day]

1. My mother's cousin got measles at 2.

He lived another 50 years, and never learned to talk.

When i was growing up, there were children born deaf and with heart problems because their mother got German Measles (rubella- the "R" in the MMR vaccine).

My friend's brother caught the mumps from her (she caught it from me), and became sterile.

And no mother who had to take a couple months off work while her 4 children went - one by one- through completely normal bouts of measles would think that there were no problems even if there were no medical complications.

50 years later, I can still see the pockmarks on my arms from the measles and chicken pox.

Let's not even talk about the people who got polio and were put in an iron lung (think of a mini-submarine) for decades. Yeah, that was a real thing.
Or the vulnerable groups (like South American tribes) who have no resistance at all to modern diseases like this and when exposed sometimes die.

Oh, yeah, you know shingles? That painful and disfiguring condition that can be generated by stress? Guess what. You get it from the chicken pox virus which goes dormant in your body after you're done with the disease, only to erupt decades later. (Fortunately, there's a vaccine for that.)

So many of these anti-vaxxers had parents who cared enough to get them immunized. Otherwise they might have a much more realistic understanding of the dangers, and care enough to notice that hundreds of thousands of people in the last 4 decades have lived long and healthy lives when they would have died or been impaired by these diseases.

I have no patience for them. I think they should be arrested for child neglect.

[Fuzzpope]

2. I got chickenpox twice.

I have a hilarious story about the second time I had it,?but it's probably not very appropriate to repeat here..

Also, Mrs Shine is an idiot, and dangerous.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Medical child neglect.

Unless you're a pediatrician or have personal experience with childhood illness, you don't understand that there is nothing minimal about children getting sick.

Example: Strep throat can lead to scarlet fever that can lead to rheumatic heart disease, permanently damaging hearts into adulthood. (But it was just a sore throat!)

I could understand if the parents had no insurance and hence, no choice. But there are alternatives in Medicaid and other government-funded health insurance for children. What we're witnessing is a hysteria on unproven theories about vaccines and autism.

[Maeve]

4. A few years ago, it was discovered that measles can destroy immunity to other diseases

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/05/07/measles-immune-system/#.XG1a77hOlnI

The outbreak of measles that originated at Disneyland earlier this year drew lots of attention to gaps in vaccination for the disease. More than 100 people were infected before the outbreak was brought under control in April.

However, the effects of measles may be with those individuals for quite some time. A new study finds that the measles virus erases the immune system’s memory, leaving patients vulnerable to other infectious diseases for up to three years afterward.

And researchers think that’s why the advent of vaccination against measles also seemed to reduce childhood deaths from other infectious diseases. It appears that vaccination protects against not just the measles virus, but also many other diseases.

[argyl]

5. Damn you, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.

Because of you two I never had the opportunity to
enter the " develope your natural immunity to polio" lottery.