tagged w/ measles
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European countries need to act now to tackle measles outbreaks, the World Health Organization warns.
The WHO report says there were over 26,000 measles cases in 36 European countries from January to October 2011.
Western European countries reported 83% of those cases, with 14,000 in France alone.
In England and Wales, there were just under 1,000 confirmed measles cases in that period - compared with just 374 in the whole of 2010.
Altogether, measles outbreaks in Europe have caused nine deaths, including six in France, and 7,288 hospitalisations.
France has now launched a nationwide campaign to raise awareness about the need for MMR vaccination.
Jean-Yves Grall, the Director-General for Health in France, said: "France can simply not afford to have deaths, painful and costly hospitalisations, disruptions to work and school from a completely vaccine-preventable disease."
Ninety per cent of European cases were amongst adolescents and adults who had not been vaccinated or people where it was not known if they had been vaccinated or not.
And measles from Europe has been linked to outbreaks in several other countries including Brazil, Canada and Australia.
'Potential danger'
Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO regional director for Europe, said: "The increase in measles in European countries reveals a serious challenge to achieving the regional measles elimination goal by 2015.
"Every country in the European region must take the opportunity now to raise coverage amongst susceptible populations, improve surveillance and severely reduce measles virus circulation before the approaching measles high season."
A spokeswoman for the Health Protection Agency, which covers England and Wales, said: "Anyone who missed out on MMR as a child will continue to be at risk of measles, which explains why we are continuing to see cases in a broad age range."
"We are again reminding parents and young adults of the importance of immunisation. We cannot stress enough that measles is serious and in some cases it can be fatal."
"Measles is a highly infectious and potentially dangerous illness which spreads very easily. Whether you stay here in the UK or travel abroad it is crucial that individuals who may be at risk are fully immunised."European countries need to act now to tackle measles outbreaks, the World Health... more
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Amid the graves of Somalia's children
CNN...
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Burying a child: A mother's unending grief
Sanjay Gupta MD
By Sanjay Gupta, M.D., Chief Medical Correspondent
August 11, 2011 11:25 a.m. EDT
Fight to save Somali kids
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Gupta's visit with Somalian refugees brings disturbing memories
He recalls the grieving mother of a boyhood friend who died
Thousands of Somalian parents have buried their children this summer
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Editor's note: Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes you deep inside the misery of the largest refugee camp in the world, "SGMD," Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 a.m. ET
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Dadaab, Kenya (CNN) --
When I was in the third grade, a classmate of mine died of leukemia. None of us knew he was sick, only that his mother hadn't let him attend school in a while.
More than 30 years later, I still remember the awful day my mom told me my friend had passed away. I made a card for his mother, and walked to their house to deliver it. She was too overcome to take any visitors, but thanked me and took the card. I can recall her broken up face when she shut the door.
Over time we lost touch, but during the holidays a couple of years ago, I stopped by her home to pay a visit. She recognized me right away, smiled and invited me in for a cup of coffee. And then, while hanging my jacket, she began to tremble and cry.
So many years later, the sorrow was just under the surface. The experience left an indelible impression on me, one that I better understood after becoming a parent myself. It violates a natural order of life to bury your own child, and I am not sure the grief ever goes away.
That's the position 30,000 Somali parents found themselves in this summer. And, 600,000 more children may be buried before the end of the year. In just about any other place on Earth, those numbers would scream out from international headlines, but not here in East Africa.
Inside the Dadaab Refugee Camp, a mass burial site sits within walking distance of the close cluster of tents. Amin Hassan took me to see the tiny burial site of her 1-month old daughter, Addison.
It was nearly lost among all the other shallow, hastily dug graves. Small sticks mark these raised plots of dirt with nothing else except bits of colored plastic trash stuck in the ground and blowing in the wind.
There are no nameplates, no flowers and no reminders of their lives. People here just vanish.
"She was perfectly healthy when she arrived," Amin told me.
They had left Somalia in search of food and water, and felt relief when they finally reached the camp. It may have been contaminated water that caused little Addison's intractable diarrhea and vomiting or an overwhelming infection.
Pertussis or whooping cough is something they see quite often here. "And measles," one of the doctors told me.
Many of these infections are wildly contagious, especially among the hundreds of thousands of un-vaccinated kids in these camps.
As I stood and spoke to Hassan, with all those tiny burial sites around us, I couldn't help but think of my friend and his mother. I thought of that unnatural order of parents burying their children.
I thought about Hassan's lifelong grief.
Amin Hassan dug the grave for her daughter by herself.
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.Amid the graves of Somalia's children
CNN...
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Burying a child: A... more
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Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: August 1, 2011
PHOTO: A malnourished child at Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. More than 500,000 Somali children are verging on starvation.
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Amid Famine, Dangers Hinder Aid to Somalia
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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The group is widely blamed for causing a famine in Somalia by forcing out many Western aid organizations, depriving drought victims of desperately needed food. The situation is growing bleaker by the day, with tens of thousands of Somalis already dead and more than 500,000 children on the brink of starvation.
Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.
Most parents do not have money for medicine, so entire families sit on old-fashioned cholera beds, with basketball-size holes cut out of the middle, taking turns going to the bathroom as diarrhea streams out of them.
“This is worse than 1992,” said Dr. Lul Mohamed, Banadir’s head of pediatrics, referring to Somalia’s last famine. “Back then, at least we had some help.”
Aid groups are trying to scale up their operations, and the United Nations has begun airlifting emergency food. But many seasoned aid officials are speaking in grim tones because one of Africa’s worst humanitarian disasters in decades has struck one of the most inaccessible countries on earth. Somalia, especially the southern third where the famine is, has been considered a no-go zone for years, a lawless caldron that has claimed the lives of dozens of aid workers, peacekeepers and American soldiers, going back to the “Black Hawk Down” battle in 1993, spelling a legacy that has scared off many international organizations.
“If this were Haiti, we would have dozens of people on the ground by now,” said Eric James, an official with the American Refugee Committee, a private aid organization.
But Somalia is considered more dangerous and anarchic than Haiti, Iraq or even Afghanistan, and the American Refugee Committee, like other aid groups, is struggling to get trained personnel here.
“It is safe to say that many people are going to die as a result of little or no access,” Mr. James said.
This leaves millions of famished Somalis with two choices, aside from fleeing the country to neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia, where there is more assistance. They can beg for help from a weak and divided transitional government in Mogadishu, the capital. Just the other day there was a shootout between government forces at the gates of the presidential palace. “Things happen,” was the response of Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, Somalia’s new prime minister.
Or they can remain in territory controlled by the Shabab, who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and have tried to rid their areas of anything Western — Western music, Western dress, even Western aid groups during a time of famine.
CONTINUED...
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http://current.com/shows/upstream/93350473_famine-in-somalia.htm
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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/08/02/world/africa/SOMALIA/SOMALIA-articleInline.jpg
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Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine
By JEFFREY... more
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State, local and federal health agencies are working to prevent an outbreak of measles after a woman carrying the contagious infection traveled widely within the United States, federal officials said on Sunday.
:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/27/us-usa-measles-idUSTRE71Q2RI20110227State, local and federal health agencies are working to prevent an outbreak of measles... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds
By the CNN Wire Staff
January 5, 2011 7:11 p.m. EST
Dr. Andrew Wakefield misrepresented or altered medical histories to bolster his 1998 study, an investigation found.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* British journal BMJ accuses Dr. Andrew Wakefield of faking data for his 1998 paper
* "The damage to public health continues" as a result of the autism-vaccine claim
* Vaccination rates dipped, measles cases increased after the study's publication
* The study was retracted and Wakefield lost his license in 2010
(CNN) -- A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."
Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May 2010. Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful Wednesday.
"Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states.
The now-discredited paper panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children getting the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates dropped sharply in Britain after its publication, falling as low as 80 percent by 2004. Measles cases have gone up sharply in the ensuing years.
In the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than in any other year since 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 90 percent of those infected had not been vaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown, the CDC reported.
"But perhaps as important as the scare's effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it," the BMJ editorial states.
Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them. Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers -- a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. After years on controversy, the Lancet, the prestigious journal that originally published the research, retracted Wakefield's paper last February.
-- Unfortunately, (Wakefield's) core group of supporters is not going to let the facts dissuade their beliefs that MMR causes autism.
--Dr. Max Wiznitzer, pediatric neurologist
The series of articles launched Wednesday are investigative journalism, not results of a clinical study. The writer, Brian Deer, said Wakefield "chiseled" the data before him, "falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare."
According to BMJ, Wakefield received more than 435,000 pounds ($674,000) from the lawyers. Godlee said the study shows that of the 12 cases Wakefield examined in his paper, five showed developmental problems before receiving the MMR vaccine and three never had autism.
"It's always hard to explain fraud and where it affects people to lie in science," Godlee said. "But it does seem a financial motive was underlying this, both in terms of payments by lawyers and through legal aid grants that he received but also through financial schemes that he hoped would benefit him through diagnostic and other tests for autism and MMR-related issues."
Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a pediatric neurologist at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, said the reporting "represents Wakefield as a person where the ends justified the means." But he said the latest news may have little effect on those families who still blame vaccines for their children's conditions.
"Unfortunately, his core group of supporters is not going to let the facts dissuade their beliefs that MMR causes autism," Wiznitzer said. "They need to be open-minded and examine the information as everybody else."
Wakefield's defenders include David Kirby, a journalist who has written extensively on autism. He told CNN that Wakefield not only has denied falsifying data, he has said he had no way to do so.
"I have known him for a number of years. He does not strike me as a charlatan or a liar," Kirby said. If the BMJ allegations are true, then Wakefield "did a terrible thing" -- but he added, "I personally find it hard to believe that he did that."
CNN's Elizabeth Cohen and Miriam Falco contributed to this report.Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds
By the... more
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If you didn't vaccinate your kids, you too could find yourself partly responsible for the resurgence of a disease thought eliminated in 2000.
Measles—a highly contagious disease-causing virus—is making a comeback in the U.S., thanks to parents fears over vaccines. Fifteen children under 20, including four babies, have been hospitalized and 131 sickened by the red splotches since the beginning of this year in 15 states and the District of Columbia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC had announced in 2000 that the disease was eliminated in the U.S. thanks to a vaccine that can completely control it. But fears of autism have led some parents to forego this treatment and at least 63 of the sickened children were unvaccinated.
Peditrician Pauline Filipek of the University of California, Irvine told ScientificAmerican.com this spring that parents who don't vaccinate their kids are putting the tykes at risk of long-forgotten diseases, like measles. What they're not doing: preventing autism.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=measles-is-back-and-its-because-you-2008-08-22If you didn't vaccinate your kids, you too could find yourself partly responsible... more
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A government watchdog in Australia stated a website giving out information against vaccinations was posing a health risk.
The website owned by the Australian Vaccination Network became noticed by Health Care Complaints Commission because it was high up in Australias google searches for vaccination information.
The HCCC states the website gave out misleading and incorrect information about vaccinations, like claims that 'measles is a non threatening illness' when the illness has caused 733,000 deaths worldwide.
"It also claims that "vaccines have never been tested", on the grounds that they do not undergo double-blind crossover placebo trials. In these, those being vaccinated would be switched to receiving placebos and vice versa.
However, the group fails to mention that such crossover trials are impossible for vaccines, because the effects of vaccines would linger in participants after they had been switched to placebos."-NewscientistA government watchdog in Australia stated a website giving out information against... more
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I can't get over that I'm reading a story about Measles in the year 2009...
"Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- More than 12,000 Europeans, mostly children, contracted measles in the past two years as parents shunned vaccinations, casting doubt on public health efforts to eradicate the infectious disease by 2010, researchers said.
While vaccines against measles have been standard across Europe for two decades, fluctuations in coverage between countries and ethnic groups lead to sporadic outbreaks. Some parents refuse immunizations for their children, fearing a tie between the shot and autism, though a link hasn’t been proven.
Tracking in 32 countries found 12,132 measles cases in 2006 and 2007, including seven deaths, with another 6,000 infections reported in the first three quarters of 2008, said Mark Muscat, lead researcher at the vaccine preventable disease surveillance network. Romania, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Italy have vaccination rates below 90 percent, compared with the World Health Organization’s 95 percent recommendation, the study in the journal Lancet found.
“If we don’t achieve 95 percent coverage, it seems like we will never achieve the goal” of eradicating measles in Europe, said Muscat, an epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, in a telephone interview. “It has not only to be reached, but be maintained. The minute it slips away, we are at risk of having susceptible pools of people for the disease.”
In the U.S., measles cases also are rising, fueled by an increasing number of parents who chose to avoid having their children vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
(Click link to read the complete article)I can't get over that I'm reading a story about Measles in the year 2009...... more
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The UK has been named as one of the worst countries in Europe for measles, with case levels dashing global hopes of eradicating the disease by 2010.
The Lancet study says that in 2006-7 most of the 12,000 cases in Europe were found in the UK and four other nations.
In a Lancet comment article, experts said the UK was only recovering slowly from the unsubstantiated scare that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism.
Vaccination levels remain at around 85% of British children, well below target.
That means there are "serious doubts" whether a World Health Organisation target to eradicate measles by 2010 will be reached, the researchers said.The UK has been named as one of the worst countries in Europe for measles, with case... more
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A child player for japanese little league world series had the measles, infecting six other's starting a U.S. outbreak said health official's on thursday...For more on this click on link info... A child player for japanese little league world series had the measles, infecting six... more
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