Rubella eliminated in the Americas

May 3, 2015 8:56 AM

On April 29 the World Health organization declared North and South America to be free of rubella after the last reported endemic case in Argentina in 2009. The New York Times discusses the history of rubella eradication in the Americas and the case of Gene Tierney, an actress who caught the disease while performing a show in 1943.
posted by lharmon (15 comments total)

"According to Ms. Tierney’s biography, two years later, at a tennis match, she met a fan, a former member of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, who said she had slipped out of a rubella quarantine to go to the Canteen that night.

“Everyone told me I shouldn’t go, but I just had to,” Ms. Tierney recalled the woman telling her. “You were always my favorite.”

I just, I don't even...

Talk about the banality of evil.
posted by percor at 9:21 AM on May 3, 2015 [24 favorites]

It's always nice to hear that we can collectively accomplish something so positive, despite all the daily evidence to the contrary.
posted by Ickster at 9:35 AM on May 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

Huh. What's up with Japan, where there were 15,000 cases in 2013? Do they have much lower rates of vaccination for some reason?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:47 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Tierney story should be required reading for mothers who don't want to vaccinate their kids. It's just possible it's pitched at a frequency they can actually hear.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:59 AM on May 3, 2015 [13 favorites]

Huh. What's up with Japan, where there were 15,000 cases in 2013?

Tsunami aftermath?
posted by sexyrobot at 10:01 AM on May 3, 2015

Don't fret, rubella; Jenny McCarthy's got your back.
posted by aaronetc at 10:07 AM on May 3, 2015 [17 favorites]

Tsunami aftermath?

Doesn't look like it. This article in The Lancet says that the outbreak was concentrated in Tokyo and Osaka, and I don't think they would have been affected by the earthquake and tsunami. They say it had to do with low vaccination rates among men between the ages of 35 and 51, because only girls were vaccinated during those years for some reason, and low vaccination rates in general among people ages 24-35. They say there were 43 cases of congenital rubella syndrome, which seems awfully high for a completely-preventable cause of serious birth defects.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:58 AM on May 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm so glad that the MMR vaccine has had such wide adoption that we've been able to eliminate measles and rubella in the Americas. I'm sure this trend will continue. /snark
posted by Revvy at 12:17 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I had mentioned in a comment in another post that when I grew up they didn't have these vaccines yet (except Polio), so we all caught these diseases. (How do you keep kids from not touching things or coughing on each other, before you even know they are really sick?) Rubella was the cause of more than one miscarriage in our neighborhood.
posted by eye of newt at 12:18 PM on May 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

Just wait; the rich folks not vaccinating their kids will fuck it all up.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:38 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Agatha Christie, you scamp. She straight-up lifted that Gene Tierney anecdote and wrote a story around it. I had no idea that was based on a real incident.
posted by pseudonymph at 7:56 PM on May 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

...whichhhh the article mentions, oops. I just glimpsed the first comment in this thread and recognised it immediately, thinking i'd accidentally clicked the wrong tab.

Still! What a strange thing for Christie to do, given that Tierney story must have been very well known at the time.
posted by pseudonymph at 7:59 PM on May 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Just wait; the rich folks not vaccinating their kids will fuck it all up.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:38 PM on May 3
[+] [!]

I hope the rich don't vaccinate. I hope their toadies don't vaccinate, think of all the blood-shed we'll be spared!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:46 AM on May 4, 2015

I hope the rich don't vaccinate. I hope their toadies don't vaccinate, think of all the blood-shed we'll be spared!

California is already getting to see what happens when rich people don't vaccinate their kids. The result is that everybody suffers, not just the rich people.
posted by Lexica at 11:02 AM on May 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

A Marin chiropractor doesn't see it that way.

"There is so much falsehood there," said Corte Madera chiropractor Donald Harte.

"Children are not cows. They are not part of a herd. Most of the kids getting measles are vaccinated," Harte said, referring to cases in California. Asked how many of those children were vaccinated, Harte said he did not know.

a fucking chiropractor has a fucking opinion about vaccinations?

Really? Based on what, his experience cracking backs?

I think it's in a PBS Frontline episode of the fucking anti-vaxxers where an older piblic health nurse shows new medical students videos of babies with whooping cough & similar ailments that had been "eliminated".

Because Jenny Mccarthy & her back-crackers are working hard to bring them back, and new docs & nurss need to see what this shit looks like.

Watch a video of a baby w/ whooping cough once, and you'll wanna pint-glass the closest anti-vaxxer upside the head & scream at them as they bleed at your feet.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:56 PM on May 4, 2015