Ralph Massullo: Vaccines — one of public health’s biggest achievements

It all starts with pockets of people who refuse to get their children vaccinated, and now we see the public health crisis it causes as the measles outbreak spreads throughout the U.S. and now has its first confirmed case in Florida, per the Florida Department of Health.

All preventable by vaccine.

The measles virus is so contagious that a baby under the age of 1 could get it by entering a room where someone with measles had been two hours before, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Personal freedom and freedom of choice for people who believe that vaccines are bad for their children is important. Everyone has a right to believe in anything and choose how they live their lives, but at what cost to the rest of the world?

Unfortunately, Florida’s religious exemption has been abused with parents using the religious exemption as an opt-out.

In a recent editorial from the Tampa Bay Times on the religious exemption: “It’s unfortunate that it’s come to this. The system was fine until it was abused. The bottom line is that vaccines work.”

The anti-vaccine movement is based on Facebook science, not real science.

Many parents choose not to vaccinate their children because due to a concern over autism, even though a study in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield claiming that children who receive the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine were at an increased risk of autism was fraudulent.

In a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal of the American College of Physicians, over a half-million children were studied from 1999 through Dec. 31, 2010. Researchers found that there was no increased risk for autism after the MMR vaccination was distributed to children.

Yet, we continue to see people put their own lives, the lives of their children, and thousands of other innocent babies at risk for disease.

According to the CDC, more than 500 confirmed cases of measles have been recorded this year with the most recent in Broward County. Since the disease was eliminated more than 19 years ago, the start of 2019 saw the second-largest outbreak in the U.S., to date.

FRED, a Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics, is an agent-based modeling system to help simulate patterns of epidemics. It was developed by the Public Health Dynamics laboratory in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh.

The simulation shows the possible outbreaks following the introduction of a single measles case in selected U.S. cities. It shows the importance of high vaccination rates to provide protection for an entire community.

If more than a few cases of measles appear, then herd immunity is lost and the disease spreads rapidly throughout the entire country. Unfortunately, we are at this point now.

Next to clean drinking water, vaccinations are the greatest public health achievement of all time.

The importance of vaccines is at an all-time high to save a generation from a vaccine-preventable disease that was once nearly eliminated due to vaccines.

Vaccines are rapidly becoming victims of their own success — many new parents have not seen firsthand the devastation these diseases are capable of.

It’s simple: get vaccinated and prevent a preventable disease.

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State Rep. Ralph Massullo, a dermatologist, represents House District 34.