Re: DOH: Student With Measles Traveled on Amtrak Train from Penn Station to Albany, NY (1337171) | |||
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Re: DOH: Student With Measles Traveled on Amtrak Train from Penn Station to Albany, NY |
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Posted by steamdriven on Sat Jan 31 21:04:50 2015, in response to Re: DOH: Student With Measles Traveled on Amtrak Train from Penn Station to Albany, NY, posted by AlM on Sat Jan 31 20:17:27 2015. The vaccine, like all medicine, is not 100% effective. For measles it is around 85%, so if you are vaccinated and exposed you have some risk of catching it, let's say 10%.The biggest risk is to infants; they can't be vaccinated until 12 months. They can get ear infections serious enough to cause permanent hearing damage, and in about two out of every thousand cases encephalitis and brain damage. If about 95% of a population is vaccinated, measles is effectively terminated; it can't reproduce fast enough to spread. If less than the critical number are immune(idk the exact figure), it will not only spread but can mutate so that the vaccine no longer works. That would be a great joy to the tinfoil hat folks (they put out a book describing it as "...Marvelous Measles", I won't link to it), and quite a setback for public health. |
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