FL’s surgeon gen’l is a palmetto bug…or at the very least, has the brain of one.
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I take offense on behalf of members of order Blattodea everywhere!
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It’s not yet clear what flight the infected, unvaccinated child was on at JFK in New York City on Feb. 25. But the child then took a China Airlines airport shuttle bus from Terminal 4 to Pho Ha Saigon in north Philadelphia, before visiting both True North Pediatrics Associates of Plymouth and CHOP’s King of Prussia Campus Emergency Department on Feb. 26.
The number of people exposed here is kinda terrifying. No clue what the vaccine rates are up there, but all it needs to do is find a pocket of antivaxxers to start a new large outbreak. @KathyPartdeux, any insights?
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That’s not high enough, and there will be enclaves of much lower uptake than that. I sincerely hope it does not get a foothold, but I kinda expect it will.
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Will parents send infected kids to school? To be seen I guess. Cover up the spots with concealer?
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Lancaster is only 80 miles from Philly. The Amish are hit and miss with vaccines and have been trending toward greater rejection of them in recent years. I’m guessing that is the first group in this region it’ll really take hold in.
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A person can be contagious for up to 4 days before they become symptomatic. So the question is not, “will parents send sick kids to school,” but “will parents send exposed kids to school.” In this setting, that is a lot harder because they probably won’t know that they were exposed until after they have spread it to lots of fellow travelers. I don’t think most folks understand just how insidious measles is. It can hang in the air for hours after someone has passed through, in can become infectious days before showing any symptoms, it will infect 90% of vulnerable folks exposed. For all these reasons, it has an R0 of up to 18. That is unthinkably huge. And RFK jr and his fellow antivaxx loons have been insanely successful at bringing back previously eliminated diseases. I have been doing this for 30 years and have never (so far) seen measles, polio, small pox, diphtheria, tetanus (in humans, anyway), and most of my colleagues have never seen chicken pox, H. flu meningitis, Strep pneumo meningitis, and so on. That is all about to change in a big, ugly way, and these assholes have blood on their hands.
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Yes. Yes they will. Because they will not be able to afford staying home with them and missing the pay for that week.
So. Much. Winning.
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All you need to know about how measles sucks, that we all used to know but forgot,
because it was fucking eliminated!
(Yes, these are old articles. The beast has not changed.)
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Remember stories of folks dying from eating polar bear livers? That was due to vitamin A toxicity.
If there are no complications, a person will usually recover quickly.
If further complications from vitamin A toxicity have occurred, such as liver or kidney damage, a doctor will treat these separately. Liver damage from hypervitaminosis is not always reversible (Vitamin A and Carotenoids - Health Professional Fact Sheet), however.
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I think there was a House episode about this…
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Were they all out of arsenic?
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Myrick, a 38-year-old family medicine and obstetrics physician in the tiny town of Seminole, looked back to medical texts to learn more about the disease, once thought to be nearing eradication in the U.S. Now, she’s treated nearly a dozen cases and counting. In just over a month’s time, the rural doctor has become one of the nation’s only doctors with firsthand experience of how infectious, and serious, measles is. And she is an unwitting expert in a disease she never thought she’d treat.
We have been discussing this here. No one in my practice has any experience with it, and rashes never look like the pictures in books. I have little confidence that I could rapidly identify it. Last night I talked with my niece, who is a peds intern in NC. They are trying to educate themselves about what to look for (especially because she has a large number of antivaxx families) but no one there has ever seen it either. I just cannot express how it feels to have been doing this for 30 years, including 5 as a PICU doc, and thinking you have seen everything, only to find that this storm is coming, and you have no fucking clue how to deal with it. Don’t get me wrong, we will deal if and when we have to, but we should not have to, damn it all.
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Cross posting here from the politics thread:
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I came across this data for measles in the UK. The rate there is higher than I would have expected:
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Can’t forget that the “MMR causes autism” meme started in UK with the Wakeman bullshit paper. It migrated and evolved across the pond, but this particular iteration had its genesis in England.
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Right, but unlike in the US it looks like measles was never eradicated there, even briefly. The lowest number of reported infections for any year there was 360 in 2021, and the next lowest was 698. Prior to Covid they never had fewer than 1000 cases per year. In contrast, CDC stats say that the U.S. had fewer than 100 new cases per year between 1998 and 2010, and other than in 2019 (and probably this year) we haven’t exceeded 1000 annual cases since 1992.
So I just wasn’t expecting us to look favorable compared to any developed country, and it surprised me how stark the difference is, especially since we’ve got about 5X their population.
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The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) said on Thursday the individual was unvaccinated and that the official cause of death is still under investigation.
Watch for “He didn’t die of measles, he died with measles” BS coming from the right any moment now…
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