Summary
A measles outbreak in rural West Texas has surged to 49 confirmed cases, mostly among unvaccinated school-age children, with officials suspecting hundreds more unreported infections.
The outbreak is centered in Gaines County, home to a large Mennonite population with low vaccination rates. Despite CDC support, Texas has not requested federal intervention.
The outbreak has now spread to Lubbock, raising wider public health concerns.
Experts warn it could persist for months without increased vaccination efforts, but skepticism toward vaccines remains a significant barrier.
I hope some day we can invent some sort of treatment that could prevent kids from ever getting this disease.
Like why don’t they just make something that makes the disease not hurt us and then put it in our bodies… Why do they have to have all this lab processed shit that they don’t actually know what it does and try to put it in our bodies…
You know what’s interesting is that the first real anti-vaxxers started because old vaccines would use pus from an infected cow. Something about it being unholy worship of cow or some nonsense.
Now the anti-vaxx crowd is all crying about synthetics… Can’t make anyone happy.
The truly OG anti-vaxxers had some among them that thought it was against their god’s will to combat disease, if you can fucking believe it (people are stupid and horrible, it turns out):
https://newrepublic.com/article/121000/puritanical-roots-anti-vaxxer-movement-go-back-300-years
To treat small pox was seen as a form of blasphemy—a moral evil that refused to recognize that epidemics were acts of God.
I just don’t understand how such a “god” could be worthy of worship, then. Imagine losing 9 children before they reached adulthood. I’d flip this “god” of theirs the bird, and try the cure, thankyouveryfuckingmuch.
Well puss is gross man…
I had this idea, like what if we used our own cells to make some of the identifying surface proteins of viruses and stuff, and use that to train our immune system on what to look for. We wouldn’t even need to cultivate the pathogen itself at all.
My greatest fear is that we will never find the cure for being an idiot. I know for some people that the disease is fatal.
Luckily for you we’ll soon be able to test your fear “Trump’s education secretary may be asked to dismantle the Education Department. Here’s what it does” https://apnews.com/article/education-department-trump-linda-mcmahon-9fc4fcef00e11b842063235798119cfc AP February 2025
The part that sucks in all of this: the children who died didn’t choose to not get the vaccine. Their parents did.
They might not die. They might just go blind or dead or have brain damage.
But no autism! Cause that’s wOrSt PoSsIbLe thing!
As the parent of an autistic child, I’d much rather him be alive and autistic than killed by a completely preventative means.
Of course, that doesn’t even matter because vaccines don’t fucking cause autism.
As an autist who is also vaxxed against many many things, I got autism ^2
Man… That’s a good point. These people are so fucked up.
Damn, lucky kids. If only the rest of us could get a guiltless exit. (No Im not suicidal)
Sending you a virtual hug. Life is hard and everyone needs hugs now and then
Might have to start building walls around the areas where idiots are giving each other preventable diseases.
How bad are the measles, really? Asking because I was born in the 1st fucking world and never met anyone under a 100 that met someone with it.
We think of measles as a minor viral infection of kids that causes fever, rash, and a runny nose, and goes away without major complications. Unfortunately, that is not always so. Nervous system disease is a particular problem. SSPE occurs as a late, fatal measles complication in one out of 1,367 cases of measles in children younger than 5. One out of 1,000 children with measles gets an infection of the brain (encephalitis) early in the course of measles. About 15% of children with measles encephalitis die. Measles encephalitis led to the death of the writer Roald Dahl’s daughter Olivia.
Children’s brains can also develop an allergic reaction to the measles virus several weeks after infection. This is called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). Children seem to recover, then get fever, confusion, headaches, and neck stiffness. Like SSPE and measles encephalitis, ADEM occurs in about one out of 1,000 cases of measles. It is fatal in 10% to 20% of patients. Survivors of measles encephalitis and ADEM often have epilepsy, brain damage, or developmental delay.
Measles has other serious complications. During pregnancy, it causes miscarriages. Measles can infect the cornea, and was once a common cause of blindness. Ear infections and hearing loss are frequent. Measles virus also infects the lungs, causing pneumonia in 3% to 4% of cases. Measles weakens the immune system for at least two months. Sometimes patients die of other infections immediately after they recover from measles. In a measles epidemic that killed more than 3,000 soldiers in the US Army in 1917–18, bacterial pneumonia was the major cause of death.
Measles: The forgotten killer - John Ross, MD, FIDSA, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing
Essentially, when you’re infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it’s ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what’s good and what’s bad almost from scratch. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia
current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what’s good and what’s bad almost from scratch
While that’s horrifying, I wonder if it could offer a glimpse into ways to get rid of allergies.
Wow that’s nuts.
Yeah, but this doesn’t happen if you eat right, work out, get your chakras aligned and get enough vitamin D from sunshine, right?
Well, that sounds pretty bad, but how contagious is it?
Extremely contagious
Extremely, iirc. According to wikipedia:
It is extremely contagious: nine out of ten people who are not immune and share living space with an infected person will be infected.[5] Furthermore, measles’s reproductive number estimates vary beyond the frequently cited range of 12 to 18,[17] with a 2017 review giving a range of 3.7 to 203.3
For context the reproductive number (average number of unexposed people a carrier will infect) of the most virulent strains of COVID-19 is 3-8. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35262737/ (basic vs effective rate refers to the infectiveness in a naive population vs one which is taking measures and/or has immunity).
This is also all exponential so small increases in R number have big impacts nya.
Pretty sure measles is the one where you can catch it by just walking into a room where someone where an infected person was two hours ago.
Imagine it’s third period trig and you caught measles from the kid who was in first period trig without ever having seen him.
It’s bad. Afaik measles is the most contagious disease we’ve ever seen.
REALLY fucking bad
Roald Dahl’s daughter died from an escalated case of measles. 1962 or something.
I have no first-hand experience with it either, but understand that in addition to its direct shitty flu-like symptoms and the telltale rash, it has this strange ability to factory reset your immune system so you get to go through all those other diseases your body fought off in the past again.
Vaccinations too.
Y’know…maybe that’s why the anti-vaxxers want measles. And want it to make a comeback.
“In the US, 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized. Five percent develop pneumonia, and up to 3 in 1,000 die of the infection. In rare cases, measles can cause a fatal disease of the central nervous system called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which develops years after infection. Measles also wipes out immune responses to other infections (a phenomenon known as immune amnesia), making people vulnerable to other infectious diseases.”
In the US, 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized.
1 in 5 people with measles are hospitalized. Good thing they’ve got socialized healthcare to cover that!
Oh… wait.
Kills around 3/1000 in the US, BUT
Measles is a leading cause of vaccine-preventable childhood mortality.
Compared to a lot of terrible shit, less bad? But still bad. You’d have to be young or old to die from it with modern medicine.
modern medicine.
Like vaccines!
Sorry, we can’t talk about illegal drugs.
modern medicine.
So with RFK we’re doomed.
Roadkill RFK will be harvesting their dead for food. Allegedly.
Even worse, he’ll leave them in Central Park.
Good thing everyone I know is vaccinated.
Vaccines aren’t anywhere near 100% effective, they rely on herd immunity which means enough people have to have the vaccine so the disease can’t get a foothold and goes extinct.
While they might not be 100% effective, but 99% or even 90% are good enough to stop a disease from getting a problem.
I guess they are going to need to get a consultation from Brainworms about how to eat right, work out, make sure they have proper septic systems, and get their chakras aligned…
The anti-intellectuals strike again. Working very hard to turn America into a shithole country.
My God. If only there was some sort of preventative measure they could have taken!
Well, their god is maybe the problem:
https://newrepublic.com/article/121000/puritanical-roots-anti-vaxxer-movement-go-back-300-years
The anti-vaccine movement today is not solely religious in character, but much of its rhetoric is identical to theological arguments made against inoculation more than three hundred years ago. As the Florida-based organization KNOW (“Kids Need Options Without Vaccines”), puts it, “All vaccines are made in violation of God’s Word.” Such thinking is partly responsible for the worst measles epidemic in twenty years.
If you think your god wants you and/or your kids to die from preventable diseases, maybe it’s time for a new one?
remember who did this. it’s not over.
Measles to the left me, bird flu to the right me, stuck in the middle of both of them.
Lost my uncle at the height of covid because he wouldn’t get vaccinated, apparently because he thought it was population control not sure how many more kids he was going to have at 70 but there we go. He basically spent too long on nonsense Facebook pages and the inevitable happened, all because some random people online convinced him and they will never be held to account.
So from what lemmy is reporting, we know West Texas has a measles outbreak and some giant fracking earthquake to contend with. Maybe toss in some radioactive exposure from a now-unmonitored nuclear facility and we’ve got the makings of a superhero origin story.
That’s a world with hope.
We’ll just get an infectious form of super-cancer that’s spread by mutant mosquitoes.
we’ve got the makings of a
superhero origin storyzombie apocalypse.FTFY
It’s adorable that you think a hero would come out of Texas…
Wait, didn’t Preacher come out of Texas?
Written by a guy from Northern Ireland.
Walker Texas ranger would like a word with you.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/15/texas-rangers-racist-violent-history/
The original purpose of the Rangers was to kill Indians and capture escaped slaves. They were killing native Texans with the wrong color skin for decades.
In reality they just end up with a debilitating form of cancer, and die penniless under a bridge.
In West Texas? It’ll be a supervillain.
“It’s not that they’re not educated. It’s just
what their belief isthey’re complete idiots.”FTFY
