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Comment by NeoBasilisk | Hacker News Reader

Amazing that a disease that was eradicated decades ago can be brought back so easily by human stupidity

Happens more often than you think.

We'd probably have eradicated polio already but the Taliban keeps killing off humanitarians in Pakistan.

My dad's cousin spent his life trying to eradicate guinea worm with the CDC but now we have a bunch of civil wars breaking out in the endemic regions.

> We'd probably have eradicated polio already but the Taliban keeps killing off humanitarians in Pakistan.

It’s important to remember that this was the direct result of the CIA’s use of a vaccination program as a cover:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28764582/

Whether or not you agree with that call, it seems likely to be an enduring side-effect.

It’s very strange to see this downvoted. It’s completely factual and on topic. The CIA got thousands of innocent people crippled or killed just to track down one man. Quite possibly millions, depending on how long it goes on and how widespread it becomes again.

It’s very strange to see this downvoted. It’s completely factual and on topic.

I often see this pattern if I talk about anything controversial: 2 or 3 initial downvotes, followed by more upvotes. It can also just stay at -3 and never go up. Then sometimes, I get 50 or 90 upvotes.

The CIA got thousands of innocent people crippled or killed just to track down one man. Quite possibly millions, depending on how long it goes on and how widespread it becomes again.

The thought process seems to assume that they can be "invisible" and their activities have no externalities or long term repercussions. It's analogous to injection with needles. The assumption holds true for small n. It falls apart with large n.

> I often see this pattern if I talk about anything controversial: 2 or 3 initial downvotes, followed by more upvotes. It can also just stay at -3 and never go up. Then sometimes, I get 50 or 90 upvotes.

I suspect (based on things some of the mods have said) is that while the number of upvote points is capped, the number of negative points isn't, with the intention of keeping a bad comment from crashing someone's karma. As such, for controversial posts (that a chunk of people feel strongly enough to vote about), the post can quickly hit a negative but then eventually be overwhelmed by positive votes (as long as it isn't flagged for one reason or another).

Thanks for that, absolutely a valid component and it is unfair to see you being downvoted. Tie this in with my other comment: When you influence a population's emotions towards a company, country, or thing.... it will be harder to overcome this than through just stating facts.

Thanks for sharing this, that's a very interesting article.

Serious question: is impersonating aid workers a violation of the Geneva convention or other international law?

With respect to Taliban killing off humanitarians, it doesn’t help that the CIA organized a fake vaccine drive to get Osama Bin Laden’s family DNA [0]. The fake vaccine in question was for hepatitis B, but if your threat model requires you to be suspicious of humanitarian workers, then you’ll act appropriately.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...

Update:

I’m not sure why the sibling poster and I received downvotes: we both provided the same fact that a branch of the US government conducted their operations in such a way that harmed the perception of vaccines amongst groups of people in another countries. In both the anti-vaxx movement in some places in the West and this particular incident in Pakistan and Afghanistan, you have a similar kind of attribution error involving the concept of vaccination that led to action against actual vaccinations as a whole.

You are getting downvoted because you fit the pattern that any attack on Islamic terrorists must be answer by what-aboutism about the US government.

In this case, you are correct, but normally the crimes don't compare.

Measles was never "eradicated".

That is true. What I meant to say is that any real threat of getting the disease in the US was eradicated.

"...Measles was declared eliminated (absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months) from the United States in 2000. ..."

Measles History from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

This is some shady definition. There were outbreaks in 1999, so really what does "eliminated" mean? To me it has never been "eliminated".

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4925a1.htm

The CDC page he linked to defines "eliminated", as does his comment: "absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months". You can have outbreaks of a disease that have been eliminated from a population: the disease can be reintroduced from some other population. But what you don't have is person-to-person transmission within the population.

If you're vaccinated any real threat of getting the disease in the U.S. is still eradicated. There've been 555 measles cases in the U.S. so far this year. It's unclear how many in the current outbreak were vaccinated (though in the one sub-outbreak that does have data, NY/Rockland, 3% of cases had 2 doses of MMR), but historically, only about 2-3% of cases in an outbreak are vaccinated:

https://vaxopedia.org/2019/02/14/vaccinated-vs-unvaccinated-...

That'd imply that maybe 10 vaccinated people have come down with measles in this 2019 outbreak, out of > 300M total vaccinated people. By contrast, about 51 people die every year in the U.S. from being struck by lightning.

> Amazing that a disease that was eradicated decades ago...

Measles hasn't been eradicated the way that Smallpox was declared eradicated globally in 1980.

Measles is active in many parts of the world that don't vaccinate for it.

Measles was never eradicated, you're probably thinking of smallpox. We no longer vaccinate for small pox specifically because it was eradicated.

I agree with your first sentence. I will make a minor correction to your second one.

Routine vaccinations stopped. Samples of the virus continue to be found (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat... ) and it appears that it would not be difficult to recreate. There is therefore a potential for a future outbreak, perhaps even done deliberately.

Some people still get smallpox vaccinations. In addition to lab workers working on smallpox or similar organisms ( https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/who-gets-vaccina... ), https://health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Health-Readiness/I... points out under "Who in DoD is going to get the smallpox vaccine?" that:

> "Smallpox vaccination is currently required for uniformed personnel deploying or assigned to the Korean Peninsula for 15 or more consecutive days. It is also mandatory for certain designated emergency-essential personnel and contractors, uniformed personnel assigned to special units, and comparable U.S. government civilian employees. However, requirements may change based on threat.

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