Tents, signs, protests and chants are all the rage these days for showing our growing distrust of government and big corporations. Want to know another way that distrust is manifesting in America?
Through whooping cough, measles and diphtheria.
Yup. Stats from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have gone totally retro, with old-school diseases coming back stronger than pencil skirts. Why?
Our nation’s parents have a growing distrust of vaccinations, one of medicine’s greatest advances. And we’re not just talking about 2 or 3 percent anymore. The fringe who didn’t believe in medicine for religious and other reasons has exploded into a 10 percent, largely yuppie epidemic.
A report published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics says that one in 10 parents are avoiding or delaying vaccines in their children because of safety concerns. So now places such as San Diego and Minneapolis are the backdrops for mini-epidemics of deadly diseases not seen in generations.
The anti-vaccine movement began gaining momentum about a decade ago, when folks started to allege a link between immunization and autism, fueled by studies from a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield. It was seized on by parents desperate to find an explanation for the sharp rise in diagnoses of autism in children, including their own.
The embrace of everything eco- and bio- and whole and organic also drove the rejection of stuff manufactured in a lab that is injected into your babies.
Earlier this year, Wakefield’s study was at last retracted by the British medical journal Lancet because some of the data turned out to be bogus.
Still, the number of parents who won’t trust shots keeps rising, primarily among “white, educated populations of people with computers,” according to Alexandra Stewart, who teaches health policy at George Washington University.
