Comment: So what does this say about the vaccination? The reporter skirts the issue, but if 95% of the public is vaccinated against measles and "nearly half" of those who get the disease are the un-vaccinated which means that MORE than half were vaccinated!!! that isn't saying much for its preventive effects, is it?
The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that's just for the first seven months of the year and doctors are troubled by the trend. There were only 42 cases for all of last year.
"We're seeing a lot more spread. That is concerning to us," said Dr. Jane Seward, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pediatricians are frustrated, saying they are having to spend more time convincing parents the shot is safe.
"This year, we certainly have had parents asking more questions," said Dr. Ari Brown, an Austin, Texas, physician who is a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The CDC's review found that a number of cases involved home-schooled children not required to have the vaccines.
Measles, best known for a red skin rash, is a potentially deadly, highly infectious virus that spreads through contact with a sneezing, coughing, infected person.
It is no longer endemic to the United States, but every year some Americans pick it up while traveling abroad and bring it home. Measles epidemics have exploded in Israel, Switzerland and some other countries. But high U.S. childhood vaccination rates have prevented major outbreaks here.
In a typical year, only one outbreak occurs in the United States, infecting perhaps 10 to 20 people. So far this year through July 30 the country has seen seven outbreaks, including one in Illinois with 30 cases, said Seward, deputy director of the CDC's Division of Viral Diseases.
None of the 131 patients died, but 15 were hospitalized.
Childhood vaccination rates for measles continue to exceed 92 percent, but outbreak pockets seem to be forming, health officials said.
Of this year's total, 122 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. Some were unvaccinated because the children were under age 1, making them too young to get their first measles shot.
In 63 of those cases - almost all of them 19 or younger - the patient or their parents refused vaccination, the CDC reported.
In Washington state, an outbreak was traced to a religious conference, including 16 school-aged children who were not vaccinated because of parents' beliefs. Eleven of those kids were home schooled and not subject to vaccination rules in public schools.
The Illinois outbreak - triggered by a teenager who had traveled to Italy - included 25 home-schooled children, according to the CDC report.
The nation once routinely saw hundreds of thousands of measles cases each year, and hundreds of deaths. But immunization campaigns were credited with dramatically reducing the numbers. The last time health officials saw this many cases was 1997, when 138 were reported. Last year, there were only 42 U.S. cases.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has made educating parents about the safety of vaccines one of its top priorities this year, in part because busy doctors have grown frustrated at the amount of time they've been spending answering parents' questions about things they read on the Internet or heard from TV talk shows.
Comment: How glib, equating the Internet with "TV talk shows". Perhaps they're just plainly reading the news and discovering that getting a disease isn't due to the lack of injecting foreign substances into your blood stream, but simply from lack of nutrition. Take for example, this article:
Vitamin lacking in 1 of 10 toddlers
One in every 10 Auckland infants is growing up with Third World-type vitamin deficiencies.
A four-year study led by paediatrician Cameron Grant, of the Starship children's hospital, has found that 12 per cent of Auckland toddlers aged from six months to two years do not have enough vitamin A, a deficiency that causes blindness in more than 250,000 children in developing countries each year.
Ten per cent of the Auckland infants - despite living in a country with bountiful sun and outdoor space - do not get enough vitamin D, a substance the body makes when it is exposed to sunlight. The study also found a quarter of Auckland infants have too little iron in their blood.
The study shows that many New Zealanders either do not know what is good for them and their children to eat, or cannot afford to buy the foods they need.
'We suspect that if we are finding these micronutrient deficiencies in a proportion of children, it implies that there are probably other micronutrients that are also deficient, and we suspect they may be having adverse effects on children's health," said Dr Grant.
Vitamin A deficiency was not common in developed countries, but it was a problem in the developing world and because some of New Zealand's infectious diseases epidemiology mirrored that, the doctors decided to study vitamins also.
Dr Grant also leads a study on Auckland's rate of childhood pneumonia, which is five to 10 times higher than in the United States. The high rate of such diseases was due partly to increasingly overcrowded houses in the past 10 to 15 years, and variable access to family doctors, he said. But it now seemed that illness also stemmed partly from poor diet.
Vitamin A, which is made in the body mainly from red fruits and vegetables such as peaches and carrots, is crucial for seeing at night. It also helps to protect the body against infectious diseases.
"If a child is admitted to hospital with measles, we give them a treatment of vitamin A," he said.
Humans need only a tiny amount of iron in the diet, around a hundredth of a gram a day. Yet it is essential to make the haemoglobin molecules in blood that carry oxygen around the body and give people strength and energy.
In June, the CDC interviewed 33 physicians in Austin, suburban Seattle and Hollywood, Fla., about childhood vaccinations. Several complained about patient backlogs caused by parents stirred up by information of dubious scientific merit, according to the CDC report.
Comment: Alas, the government and their pharmaceutical financed doctors wouldn't put out "dubious" information, would they? Say it ain't so. Pay no attention to those whistle-blowers.
Questions commonly center on autism and the fear it can be caused by the mercury-based preservative that used to be in most vaccines. Since 2001, the preservative has been removed from shots recommended for young children.
Brown said she wrote a 16-page, single-spaced document for parents that explains childhood vaccinations and why doctors do not believe they cause autism. She began handing it out this spring, and thinks it's been a help to parents and a time-saver for her.
"People want that level of information," she said.
Currently an Australian couple are on the run with their 48 hour baby because govt. insists on babe getting Hep vaccine and parents don't want it. This is in a country where vaccine is not mandatory.
But think about it this way, how much is big Pharma losing out on with all these renegade parents being in control of their kids health.