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I have some bad news and some good news and some bad news about the spread of deadly diseases right now. The first bad news is that I’m not talking about COVID-19. Because wouldn’t it be nice if COVID was the only disease we had to worry about? I mean, it would still suck but at least we could, like, focus. No, today I want to talk about a few other diseases: particularly, measles and pertussis.
The good news is that like COVID, we have safe and effective vaccines for each of those awful diseases. The even better news is that those vaccines are way, way MORE effective at preventing infection, spread, and death from those diseases. There are a number of reasons for that, and one of the most important, if not THE most important, is herd immunity: for the most part, we have a very high rate of vaccination, which protects everyone, whether they’re vaccinated or not.
I’ll get back to that, but first I want to tell you about a study that was published in the latest issue of The Lancet Public Health: researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine pored over data on measles infections in England between 2010 and 2019 and created mathematical models to explain a particular trend that they noticed. Their models suggest that the measles vaccine, given in two separate doses to kids when they’re about one year old and then when they’re about 4 years old, is astoundingly long-lasting. They estimate that after getting that second shot, 95% of people are protected for LIFE. That is incredible! They say that the vaccine does fade, but only by about 0.04% per year.
But now back to the bad news: that “trend” I said they noticed? They found that the number of people who contracted measles during that time period were MORE likely to be vaccinated, compared to previous decades. The number of vaccinated people getting measles TRIPLED, but why?
The models showed that the protection offered by the vaccine was superb, so how is this happening? Because of herd immunity. If 95% of people were immunized, we wouldn’t see these breakout infections, but in England during that time period only 85% of kids got both doses. That drop of just ten percentage points tripled the number of cases showing up in vaccinated people, even for a vaccine with an incredibly high level of effectiveness, which should give you some insight into why we’re still dealing with COVID-19, considering that only about 80% of Americans ever got even a single vaccination for it.
You might think that measles isn’t a big deal, but I assure you that it is. About 100,000 people die from measles each year, and a World Health Organization study published in the Lancet earlier this year found that global measles vaccination efforts have saved nearly 94 million lives since 1974, though they point out that globally the numbers are falling.
The people most likely to die from measles are infants, but it’s not great for older children and adults, either: in 2019, researchers published a paper in Science showing strong evidence that contracting measles obliterates your immune system: “Measles caused elimination of 11 to 73% of the antibody repertoire across individuals,” thus making them more susceptible to other diseases, and the only way to get that immunity back was reexposure or a new vaccination. Subjects who were already vaccinated for measles didn’t show that damage to the immune system.
It’s not just England and the developing world where the number of measles vaccinations are dropping. After all, when the dangerous quack Andrew Wakefield made up the lie that vaccines cause autism and was driven out of England, he landed here in the United States and got people like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy on his side. So the rates have been falling here, too, which is why there’s Oregon is experiencing their largest outbreak in 30 years. There are dozens of cases, all of them in unvaccinated people, most of them under the age of 18.
Okay, back to some good news: if you’re concerned about your own immunity, like if you’re in one of the places experiencing an outbreak or you’re otherwise at high risk, you can go to your doctor and get tested to see if you are still protected!
Yeah, that’s not the goodest of good news but I felt like I had to throw something in there because I’m going to dive right into some more bad news now: in addition to COVID and measles, pertussis is also currently on the rise, and there’s an even greater chance that you are not fully vaccinated for it.
Pertussis is also known as whooping cough or the “100-day cough,” which does a pretty good job of illustrating why it sucks. Again, this is an illness that can be miserable for an adult but is deadly for infants, and deadly or debilitating to the elderly and the immunocompromised. Back when people were responding more or less appropriately to COVID by masking and isolating, pertussis cases dropped. But at the start of the school year this month, the CDC has seen rates skyrocket fivefold, with cases exploding across the United States, and the UK is seeing the same problem. Worldwide, the CDC estimates more than 160,000 children die each year from whooping cough and if these rates continue to increase, it’s inevitable that we will see deaths in the US.
Unlike the measles vaccine, the vaccine for whooping cough is only good for about a decade, which is many, many adults don’t even realize they aren’t protected, which means that they could unknowingly spread the disease to vulnerable people. While we can easily point to Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vaxxers to blame for deaths from measles, deaths from whooping cough are a failure of public health communication, not of individuals who choose to not get the vaccine. That’s why my blog network, Skepchick, ran annual clinics to vaccinate people for whooping cough at big nerd events like DragonCon in the 2000s.
We don’t have the funding or, well, the blog itself anymore (thanks Mark Zuckerberg), so instead I’m using this platform to encourage you to talk to your doctor about getting your whooping cough booster. When the vaccine is given to babies, it’s called the “DTaP,” which identifies the three diseases it covers: diphtheria, tetanus, and (acellular) pertussis (“acellular” just means that one has parts of the pertussis bacteria instead of all of it). When given to adults, it’s just switched around, so ask for the “TDaP.”
And that’s the final good news: assuming you have healthcare (…) YOU can help stop the spread of these diseases. Please talk to your doctor and get your vaccines so that you and the vulnerable people around you can have a safe and healthy winter.
