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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

My niece got here measles vaccine two weeks ago. Ten days afterward she came down with, you guessed it, the measles. My first reaction was utter fear that she was going to die. But the doctor wasn't at all concerned. She'll be sick, it will suck for a little while and she'll get better.

So what the hell? First of all, the vaccine gave her the fracking measles! So who is actually spreading these diseases around?! Secondly if there's no concern of it being deadly than why the endless hyperbole over the few hundred people, out of 300 million, who get it per year?

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The measles vaccine is live attenuated, so in the rare case it does cause disease, it's less severe than wild type.

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man. In a fully susceptible population, one infected person can expect to infect 14 other people. The reason only "the few hundred people" get infected annually now is because of widespread vaccination campaigns.

Measles used to be all but inevitable, infecting literally millions, and killing hundreds each year in the US. The only reason we have come to fear vaccines is because we as a society no longer remember fearing these diseases.

http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html

Correct or not, the doctor is confident that the attenuated virus in the vaccine is sufficiently attenuated that your niece isn't going to get the bad consequences of the wild type virus.

According to Wikipedia on the MMR vaccine, "10% of children develop fever, malaise and a rash 5–21 days after the first vaccination" With numbers that high, it sounds like statistically this isn't a serious problem.

Your niece is of course not a statistic, but at least based on what I know about medicine and biology, and what I've just looked up, the odds are strongly in her favor.

Skim comments to this Daily Kos diary for testimony from people older than me about just how bad things were before we had these vaccines, including of course the family and friends who didn't make it. My parents were born in the middle 1930s; they too attest to it.

there is a concern -- that unchecked the virus could affect children not yet vaccinated, or the elderly in an outbreak.

it's common to be symptomatic of a disease when you receive a vaccine -- this is not mean you received the full force of the disease.

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