Deaths from Measles began to decline dramatically around 1910...

[SidDithers]

This graph has been posted a couple of times in a dishonest attempt to show that measles had been almost eradicated before the vaccine was introduced in 1963. However, what's obvious to anyone with half a brain, is that the graph shows deaths from measles, not cases of measles.



We know that the number of measles cases remained fairly constant up until the late 50's. During the period of 1958-1962, there were on average 503,282 measles cases and 432 measles-associated deaths reported in the US (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwR/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm).

My question to the masses is this.

What began to happen during the mid 1910's that made it more likely for someone diagnosed with Measles to survive? Was it something specific, or a combination of better medical practices?

Sid

[Warpy]

1. One of my playmates died from it in the 50s

and I bloody nearly did, myself.

Better care combined with quarantine laws certainly helped reduce mortality. The introduction of sulfa drugs in the late 30s and penicillin in the late 40s also decreased mortality in people who developed secondary infections.

A quick Google of measles encephalitis will tell you why this disease is much better prevented than treated.

[SidDithers]

3. I'm thinking cleaner drinking water...

might have something to do with it too. Chlorination of municipal water supplies was introduced around that time. Safe drinking water would go a long way in the treatment of diarrhea and dehydration, right?

Sid

[Warpy]

6. It will, but that has nothing to do with measles deaths.

[sarge43]

2. Cheap available soap, clean water, indoor plumbing,

a better understanding of how infectious disease were transmitted and the general population may have established an immunity. You'll see the same pattern with other infectious diseases like typhus. Until the turn of the 20th century infectious diseases were the number one cause of death in the US, then heart disease and cancer begun to creep up.

[SidDithers]

4. So, a combination of better understanding of disease...

and better sanitation and medical practices.

Thanks for your input :)

Sid

[sarge43]

7. You're welcome. n/t

[Warpy]

19. One thing that dawned on me last night

after I went to bed was that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 probably had quite a bit to do with it. Instead of dosing sick children with gawd knows what in a patent medicine from a traveling road show, parents started to use doctors and pharmacists for medication that had to be proven safe and effective. That would have started taking effect in 1910 or so.

Never underestimate the salubrious effects of driving charlatans and quacks out of practice.

[Frances]

5. My mother's brother was born about 1920

He died from a combination of childhood diseases: measles, whooping cough, and diptheria. I think that there was a vaccination for diptheria long before there was a vaccination for measles. Perhaps my uncle would have survived had he had only measles.

My brother was born in 1949. He caught measles when he was about 3 years old. The measles affected his hearing and he is almost deaf today.

Remember Laura's older sister in Little House on the Prairie? She caught measles, which left her blind.

Fortunately for me and my sister and my other brother, we did not have serious side effects after we had measles.

However, it never occurred to me not to get measles vaccinations for my children. I knew the possible consequences if they did get measles.

[Hestia]

10. No, Laura's sister had Scarlet Fever (strep), not measles.

on the last American Experience (PBS), they had a show about Polio and how children had immunization against Polio until clean water and sanitation came long. The children started losing it, and the epidemics started. It was very interesting show to watch. Only a very small amount of children developed the crippling Polio, mostly it was mild cases. Adults had major problems with it, like Roosevelt.

What is sad is that there appears to be a Post-Polio type of syndrome in adults who have had polio in the past.

[hedgehog]

16. According to Wkli, it was measles, scarlet fever or a stroke.

Here's another interesting nugget from Wiki:

"Complications from a life-threatening bout of diphtheria left Almanzo partially paralyzed. While he eventually regained nearly full use of his legs, he needed a cane to walk for the remainder of his life. "

I wonder what Almanzo would have thought of the DPT vaccine?

[trotsky]

24. Fascinating stuff.

Just spent an hour perusing the various Ingalls-Wilder-related Wiki pages. Growing up here in Minnesota, her books were virtually required reading in Elementary School. It's especially interesting to see how diseases we don't even give a second thought to today, profoundly affected so many lives.

[cosmik debris]

8. If we are being asked to discount the threat of measles because

deaths from measles is not a significant factor, perhaps we should also discount autism because deaths from autism is also not a significant factor.

Just what is the death rate for autism? How does it compare with the death rate for measles?

I believe the anti-vax crowd has found another dead end.

[On the Road]

9. A Lot of Deadly Microbes

become more benign over time. The species survives better when the hosts live. People used to die from syphillis, too.

If might be something else, of course, but that pattern shouldn't be surprising.

[Javaman]

11. "People used to die from syphillis, too." but then a little thing called

penicillin came along.

read up on syphilis before you make such statements like that.

prior to penicillin the main way to treat it was the use of...wait for it...mercury!

[uppityperson]

13. And nothing worse than a spirochete infected brain on mercury

I am appalled at the lack of what seems like basic health info and logic from many people. Not you, but you know what I mean.

[hedgehog]

15. Hence, the Tuskegee Institute experiment meant to determine the

natural course of the disease as opposed to simple mercury poisoning!

[On the Road]

18. That is True

but the point is that untreated syphillis used to be more virulent than it is today.

From the Wikipedia article:

"In addition, the disease was more frequently fatal than it is today. By 1546, the disease had evolved into the form we know now."

[Why Syzygy]

22. Actually arsnic. Not mercury. Wrong info.

http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Salvarsan

Salvarsan
Medical history An antisyphilitic arsenical compound synthesized by Paul Ehrlich. See Magic bullet.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

25. They are both quite toxic.

You don't want to have ANYTHING to do with Arsenic OR Mercury.

That includes mercury fillings. The EPA says mercury is the MOST toxic non-radioactive substance known.

Is that scary enough to send you to the dentist to replace your fillings that are neurotoxic??

:wtf:

[trotsky]

26. "Is that scary enough to send you to the dentist to replace your fillings that are neurotoxic??"

It better not be, because they're not.

[uppityperson]

12. Antibiotic development to counter opportunistic bacterial infections can help also

A lot of deadly microbes become more deadly over time also. Not so many people die from syphillis now because it is caught and treated better quicker. Probably not so many sheep around these days either.

[salvorhardin]

17. That might be true with parasites and symbiotes

But viruses only need to pass on their genetic material. After that is done it doesn't matter what happens to the host organism.

[hedgehog]

14. I wonder how old a disease measles is? Maybe what you are seeing is

the virus reaching an accommodation with the host. Kill too many people, and not enough survive to spread the virus. Another possibility is that as more people moved to the cities from rural areas, the population was less naive. I'm speculating that measles would go though an isolated rural community the same way it went through the Hawaiian Islands. Maybe what you are seeing is a shift from a disease that strikes as an epidemic and hits all ages to an endemic disease that smolders among children.

In any case, even if only one kid a year dies from measles, it's too many if it's your kid.

[Heddi]

20. Good Points!

I'm sure epidemiological data would show that, say, Smallpox affected 100% of the population of a fictional island in the carribbean around 1495 or so. Maybe in 1500, only 30% of the population suffered from smallpox, and in 1510, 0% of the population suffered. *** It would be easy to suggest that the decrease in rates was due to some natural immunity or a magical voo doo vaccine, but history would prove that the reason it was 0% is that everyone who was susceptible was DEAD!!!

Everyone else that was left were able to live through the initial epidemic, or had immunity previously (Europeans), or were born with immunity (children of women who developed immunity)

**these are fictional numbers and fictional years. Please try to stay on point and understand the general message being put forth---that a decline in numbers does not necessarily mean immunization. It could mean that all susceptable populations were DEAD

I know this is a reason why Ebola, while quite virulent, isn't the worlwide epidemic that it was feared to become: the people who contract and die from Ebola die too quickly for the virus to jump from host to host the way it would need to in order to create a worldwide epidemic. Ebola, for the most part, is relatively isolated in certain Ebola "hot spots" and only affects those who come in direct contact with the dying or dead. Containment and quarrantine efforts have done a really good job of keeping Ebola confined to the Hotspots.

Also, Ebola kills very quickly. You, the victim, do not have time to jump on a plane or a boat or travel to the next town to infect 100 or 1000 people. So Ebola's downfall, as far as viruses go, is Ebola itself.

[Why Syzygy]

21. One nomination ...

Medical advances using dyes

Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), a German medical scientist, carried out pioneering work into haematology, immunology and chemotherapy. He also developed the first effective treatment of syphilis, Salvarsan. He made some of his early medical advances through his research into dyes. Inspired by the aniline dyes discovered by William Perkin, Ehrlich’s doctoral dissertation was on the theory and practice of staining animal tissues.

One of his fundamental discoveries was that chemical dyes derived from coal tar did not simply colour cells or tissues, but often combined with them to form a chemical reaction. For example, dyes reacted with various components of blood cells, an important discovery for future work in haematology.

In 1882, he published his method of staining the tubercule bacillus, which enabled its diagnosis using a microscope. He also began to test methylene blue and found that it could act as a diagnostic in bacteriological work, and was also a mild antiseptic.

His work on dyes established the search for a "magic bullet" in medicine - a drug that could highlight and then target specific disease-causing micro-organisms by altering the chemical structure of these targeted molecules. This idea formed the basis of chemotherapy.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908 for his later work on immunology.

Other medical dyes:

* Prontosil red (an orange-red dye) was found by a German biochemist, Gerhard Domagt, to be antibacterial. It combated streptococcal infections. This discovery led to the development of a large number of pioneering sulfa/sulphonamide drugs
* Scarlet red stimulates the growth of particular cells and has been used to treat chronic ulcers and burns
http://www.rpsgb.org.uk/informationresources/museum/exhibitions/exhibition04/musex04dyespharm.html

Never thought about it, but the deaths were likely caused by complications, rather than measles being primary.
Do you know?

[HamdenRice]

23. Looks like it was related to anti-biotics and generally better care for secondary infections

The big drop offs seems to be around the time sulfa drugs and penicillin were introduced as Warpy and uppityperson already noted.

I would just add that in the 1800s, treatment for various infectious diseases involved other counter-productive aspects like excessive bedrest and shutting people up in rooms where their pathogens could accumulate and was replaced by fresh air and less bed rest. Also nutrition improved in the early 1900s, so many people were simply healthier when they contracted the primary viral and secondary bacterial infections.

Most of us can barely imagine what people at in the late 1800s and early 1900s in large regions of the country -- especially the south. It was a monotonous diet of cornmeal, cornbread, bacon fat and molasses, and little else. Check out Agee's, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his "field trip" among sharecroppers in the deep south to get a sense of how unhealthy most people were and what they ate.

[cureautismnow]

27. It's not only a mortality drop-off in measles.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_wEzwV3l2GhE/SPP_vaECJfI/AAAAAAAAAII/eLchQVc8StA/s400/Vaccine+-+disease+decline.gif

JAMA sez:

"During the first 8 decades of the 20th century, the infectious disease mortality rate in the United States declined substantially, consistent with the concept of epidemiologic transition. Improvements in living conditions, sanitation, and medical care probably accounted for this trend. But over a 15-year period starting in 1981, this trend reversed, with infectious disease deaths consistently increasing from year to year for the first time since the federal government began tracking mortality statistics. Now, as the end of the century nears, infectious disease deaths may again be declining; a 7% drop was registered in 1996, largely because of a substantial decline in AIDS mortality.15-16

A closer examination of the decline from 1900 to 1980 revealed that it was characterized by 3 distinct periods. During the first (1900 to 1937) and third (1953 to 1980) periods, infectious disease mortality fell by 2.3% to 2.8% per year. During the 15 years between these periods, the annual decline in the infectious disease mortality rate accelerated to 8.2%. The disease categories that contributed most to this decline were pneumonia and influenza, which fell sharply from 1938 to 1950 and subsequently leveled off for several years, and tuberculosis, which fell abruptly from 1945 to 1954 and continued to fall until the mid 1980s. These declines coincided with the first clinical use of sulfonamides (1935), antibiotics (penicillin in 1941 and streptomycin in 1943), and antimycobacterials (streptomycin, first used against tuberculosis in 1944, para-aminosalicylic acid in 1944, and isoniazid in 1952).17 However, the reasons for the steep decline from 1938 to 1952 are probably many and cannot be determined by examination of the mortality data alone."

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/1/61

This one looks at Crude Mortality Rates for All Causes, Noninfectious Causes, and Infectious Diseases



http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/1/61/FIGJOC80862F2

[varkam]

28. You do realize that those graphs refer to deaths, right? eom

[cureautismnow]

29. Yes, hence the word "mortality" in the title of the sub-thread.

:eyes:

[varkam]

30. Just making sure since you posted graphs before without realizing it.

Don't want you making the same mistake twice.

[cureautismnow]

31. No, you made the mistake.

Every graph I posted was intentional. But thanks for your concern.

[varkam]

32. Lol. Sure.

:hi: