Category: Science

Measles – 2025 05 15

We’re not quite four months into the measles outbreak here in Texas, and according to the state Department of Health and Human Services, we’ve had 717 cases, with 93 hospitalized and two school-aged children dead. Of the 717 people who’ve had measles, 13 have had one dose of measles vaccine and 17 have had two doses, leaving 687 measles patients who failed to take appropriate precautions. If you told me there were people among that 687 who couldn’t take the vaccine, I’d only be madder at the rest who could have and didn’t.

While the bulk of the outbreak is in west Texas and extending into New Mexico, it’s starting to spread. People are contagious up to four days before they get the rash and it’s not like feeling bad ever stopped people from going to work or the store or church or wherever, giving them plenty of ways to spread measles. We have occasional cases in other places, like the recent cases in Tarrant and Denton Counties that aren’t counted as part of the Texas outbreak. But Collin and Rockwall County are on the state’s board, which means they’ve linked those cases back to the west Texas epidemic. It’s only a matter of time until measles is all over the place in the Metroplex.

What kills me is that it didn’t have to be this way. We know there are folks out there who don’t want to vaccinate for religious reasons; we know that’s how the outbreak began. But because we’re now a post-truth society in America, we’re also a post-science and post-vaccine society. My late mother, who would be turning 90 in July if she were still with us, talked to me in the years before her death in 2018 about her experience getting the polio vaccine when it first came out and how grateful she was to have the option of taking the vaccine instead of getting polio (and risking post-polio syndrome). This was because she and her peers knew what it was like to have kids die from childhood diseases. I never thought that Generation X, who lost so many bright lights to AIDS, might turn out to be the lucky ones because most of our parents decided they’d rather we not die of preventable childhood diseases.

(The real problem here isn’t religious exemption; it’s eugenics. People are willing to risk their kids dying instead of risking the theoretical damage–probably imagined to be autism–a vaccine reaction might cause, never considering that childhood diseases don’t just kill but leave permanent, actual damage: blindness, deafness, brain damage, etc.)

It used to be you had to be vaccinated to go to school. I went to private schools as a child, but there was no question of my vaccinations status. Now one of the reasons kids go to private schools is so their parents can avoid vaccination requirements along with everything else about public schools they don’t like, whether it’s naughty books in the library or the presence of people the parents don’t like. The result is a the biggest measles outbreak in a quarter-century and becoming a post-herd immunity society where measles, and other diseases, are endemic. A society where we start seeing those graves with short lifespans again. It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. All we have to do is follow the science and vaccinate ourselves and our kids.

(I don’t want to talk about RFK, Jr. That’s another rant about eugenics.)

Meanwhile, here in Texas, this week the House voted in favor of a bill to allow parents who want vaccine exemptions for their kids to download them from the internet instead of having the state mail the forms. This is because we’re both far behind the times in helping citizens interact with the state and far ahead in enabling parents to ignore public health.

Sources:

We should just die

“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” 

— Fred Trump, My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’

This quote is from last year, when Fred Trump was hawking his book about his uncle, though I didn’t read it until recently. As a chronically ill person who has developed disabilities through disease progress and age, it doesn’t surprise me that the President is an open eugenicist. (You may remember he got in trouble for openly mocking a disabled reporter during his first campaign.) My lack of surprise isn’t just because he’s an awful person, though; it’s because so many people, even nominally liberal folks, feel the same way.

I’ve heard both sides of the issue: when I was young (in the 1990s) and my disabilities and illness weren’t apparent, I was often told by both older adults and peers that I needed to have kids and mother them, generally with the more or less explicitly stated premise that I was educated, white, and would produce the right kind of kids.

As I got older, people started asking about kids in a more “why don’t you have them?” way, and I learned pretty quickly that admitting that some of my chronic health problems were genetic was the quickest way to get baby-pushers out of my hair. My decision not to have kids stopped being selfish and became wise and brave, on the premise that my children would be the wrong kind of kids.

There’s no moral to this story: just the observation that Trump’s not alone in his feelings even if most people will be horrified by the extremity of this quote and the reference to expenses. I’m just grimly amused by the idea that we might finally get the death panels we’ve been threatened with since the Clinton years under a Trump presidency.

Bird flu is coming

One of the long-running stories I’ve been following over the last year is the spread of H5N1 (bird flu). I initially noticed it because we were having trouble with dairy herds in North Texas and there were some articles in the local and state press about it. There was some talk of it jumping to cats and to humans, but nobody had died of it.

That has now changed. The first bird flu death happened this week in Louisiana. News reports say he was over 65 and had underlying conditions, which is supposed to relieve the public but honestly scares me. Most of us have underlying conditions these days; I have several. If you take meds for any chronic health problem, congratulations: you’re on the less valuable list of people who can die without alarming the masses.

As a person with a chronic illness, I’m well aware that COVID isn’t over. I have a large enough circle of in-person and online friends that I get regular reports of folks who are getting the current strain even after they’ve had previous rounds. I also know a number of people who’ve had aftereffects that range from the mild to the completely debilitating. We don’t do enough in America, and certainly not in North Texas, to protect folks from COVID. That we’re starting to see people die from H5N1 and not taking measures to protect ourselves is terrifying, especially with an anti-vaccine Health and Human Services Secretary about to be nominated by the new administration. It’s only a matter of time before we get human-to-human transmission, and we could get back to where we were in March 2020 but without the will to lock down all too easily.

I’m also selfishly scared for cats. My cats are indoor-only, don’t drink raw milk, and don’t eat raw food. But I’m going to be very careful about touching any outdoor cats and potentially bringing deadly germs home to them.