BART rider with measles potentially exposed thousands in Bay area

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bart-rider-with-measles-potentially-exposed-5233352.php

by inovator • 12 years ago

38 27 12 years ago

hyperion2010• 12 years ago

Damn I wish the media would run more scare stories about pandemics of extremely virulent diseases that are actually completely preventable! "Don't want to risk having your child die? Don't want potential life long health problems? Get vaccinated today!" >_<

Goopplesoft• 12 years ago

The externalities of not getting vaccinated (see: this article) makes a strong case for requiring them or at least making a subset of them required upon exit for reentry (similar to passports) without religious exemptions.

ars2• 12 years ago

That sounds good on the surface, but has problems in the details.

Do you want a country that prohibits people from leaving when they want? So you can't require it on exit.

And the most basic right of citizenship is the ability to enter the country, so you can't require it on entry either.

All you can do is convince other countries to prohibit entry without vaccination,

whyenot• 12 years ago

I had to deal with this in Ecuador about a decade ago. I had to always carry around a health certificate showing I was vaccinated against yellow fever or they wouldn't let me enter the eastern Oriente (Amazon) region.

I think it was a good idea. Too bad there's no vaccine against bot flies :(

dylz• 12 years ago

Got an email about this from cal, might been exposed, grr. Why don't people vaccinate.

pmorici• 12 years ago

If you are vaccinated as most people in the US should be then why should you care that you were exposed?

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Not everyone is or can be vaccinated, and not everyone vaccinated has immunity. Depending on the virulity of a particular disease, some might be exposed by secondary transmission (e.g., virus particles shed onto an immune individual transferred to a susceptible one). Remember: one (conscious) method of reducing Native American populations was to distribute smallpox-infected blankets among them.

Infants, the very old, and immunocompromised individuals in particular. Given that there's a large population of HIV-infected individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, that last might be a significant public concern.

hartie• 12 years ago

Universities require all standard vaccinations. How was this student admitted to Berkeley?

fingerprinter2• 12 years ago

I knew a women who felt it was her moral duty to fight vaccinations. She had no issue forging documentation saying her kids had gotten vaccinated when they hadn't.

I've heard this is common among the anti-vax crowd. Not saying it is what happened in this case, just giving a personal anecdote.

baddox• 12 years ago

I doubt the vaccine is 100% effective.

fnordfnordfnord• 12 years ago

The linked article says the student was not vaccinated.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

Neither are airbags.

euank• 12 years ago

You can get out of vaccinations in many situations with a) a doctor's express diagnosis that you should not be vaccinated or b) claiming to have a religious reason that prohibits vaccination.

These methods might not work for all universities, but I know they work for some.

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

...and this is why people shouldn't be able to stop their children from being vaccinated because they're too stupid to understand how it works.

The UK regularly seems small-scale measles outbreaks due to the same idiots.

BART rider with measles potentially exposed thousands in Bay area

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