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January 29, 2015 at 06:47 AM
As if you haven’t heard already, Disneyland is a great place for magic moments, chance meetings with giant mice — and the measles.
Let’s talk about what doesn’t belong in that list (who doesn’t love a good game of the “one of these things is not like the other?”)
The measles outbreak tied to Disneyland has spilled over state lines and into Mexico, infecting, at last count, nearly 90 people. The majority of those infected had not received the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Other cases spread to babies too young to get vaccinated.
The biggest issue with this is that the outbreak was a completely avoidable problem (and don’t just take my word for it, take the word of U.S. health officials). This is a disease nearly eradicated by modern medicine, which makes an outbreak all the more infuriating. It’s a comeback we simply don’t need.
Sure, we can talk about a series of mishaps that led to the outbreak. We can put blame on a highly packed theme park. We can say that vaccines are never a 100 percent guarantee that you won’t get sick. We can throw problems with medical access and costs into the mix. But at the root of the issue are those who chose to forgo, or delay, vaccines for themselves or their children. Here we have a group of people who are single handedly making an outbreak like measles much more likely.
