Disneyland: The Latest Victim of the Anti-Vaxxers

Somewhere in Orange County, Mary Poppins may be running a fever. The same could be true for her coworkers—an unsuspecting Ariel, say; a suddenly swoony Goofy or Pluto or any of the other 23,000 people (OK, or characters) who punch in for work at Disneyland every day. And the same could be true too for any one of the estimated 16 million people who will pour into the theme park this year. The reason? Measles. The cause? This may not come entirely as a surprise: the anti-vaccine crowd. Just when you think they’ve been run to ground, shamed into silence, and just when you can watch a whole evening of Jenny McCarthy co-hosting the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square and not hear her utter a word of unscientific nonsense, the anti-vaxxers come roaring back. Less than two weeks into 2015 come the year’s first stories about the latest victims of the nation’s declining vaccine rate. And this time, ground zero is the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth, which is in danger of becoming the decidedly less consumer-friendly Most Expensive Disease Vector on Earth. The epidemiological numbers seem small, but the implications are big: from Dec. 15 to Dec. 20, at least 20 people are reported to have have entered Disneyland’s gates healthy and exited with measles. Of those victims, 15 were unvaccinated. Those infections occurred in a year in which California as a whole had its highest measles caseload in two decades—66, with 23 of them in Or...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized anti-vaxxers Conspiracy Theories Disneyland health measles mumps vaccines whooping cough Source Type: news