Freedom versus Public Health — an Easily Avoidable Measles Epidemic in Europe Has Weakened the World Effort to Rid the Planet of this too Often (Third World) Fatal Disease — Should There Be Limits on Ignorant People’s Perceived Right to Threaten Other People’s Health?

22 May 2012

“You can’t tell me what to do — even if what I’m doing might kill your kids”

Put that way, I imagine most of us would tell the loud mouth to shut up and get with the program.

But that is not the case in Europe, where an arguably indefensible excess of personal freedom in regard to avoiding measles vaccinations threatens to undermine the rest of the world’s health.

Measles

People my age think of measles as a once unavoidable childhood disease. Younger Americans have never seen it, presumably due to the United States’ school vaccination requirements.

Measles used to kill an estimated 2 million of the world’s children annually, before the vaccine arrived in 1963. It still kills at least 139,000.

Most of these deaths occur in undeveloped countries. They are due to secondary bacterial and viral infections that home in on the children’s measles-weakened immune systems. Richer nations can afford the medical care that nurse patients through these derivative illnesses. Poor nations cannot.

Cavalier disregard for pursuing measles vaccination programs should not sit well with ethical people anywhere.

Successful measles eradication in North, Central, and South America contrasts with Europe’s failure to contribute anything useful

From the journal Science:

While every country in the Americas, including its poorest, wiped measles off the map in 2002, Europe has been unable to do so . . . . Cases have quadrupled since 2009; France alone had more than 15,000 last year.

There were about 37,000 reported measles cases in the European region in 2011. (More than 30,000 were in the European Union, the richest part of the region.)

The reemergence has become a threat to other countries.

In 2011, the United States had 222 cases . . . the highest number since 1996, and most importations came from Europe.

Before the recent outbreaks, global measles mortality had been reduced by 74 percent from the year 2000 to 2010

From The Lancet:

Estimated global measles mortality decreased 74% from 535,300 deaths . . . in 2000 to 139,300 . . . in 2010.

Measles mortality was reduced by more than three-quarters in all WHO regions except the WHO [World Health Organization] southeast Asia region.

India accounted for 47% of estimated measles mortality in 2010, and the WHO African region accounted for 36%.

© 2012 Emily Simons, Matthew Ferrari, John Fricks, Kathleen Wannemuehler, Abhijeet Anand, Anthony Burton, and Peter Strebel, Assessment of the 2010 global measles mortality reduction goal: results from a model of surveillance data, Lancet, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60522-4 (early online publication, 24 April 2012)

Europe’s measles epidemic weakens the rest of the world’s eradication effort

Europe is under the measles microscope, due to two coming heavily touristed events:

(i) the European Football Championship in Poland and Ukraine (in June)

and

(ii) the Olympic Games in London (in July).

Both venues pose risks for transporting measles from these endemic regions to other nations that had previously gotten, or are trying to get, measles under control.

Is the European threat serious?

Diane Griffin, a measles expert at Johns Hopkins, said:

“The problem in Europe is actually more serious” than elsewhere . . . . “This is what will keep measles from being eradicated, I think.”

So what accounts for wealthy Europe’s seemingly cavalier attitude?

Dr. Ole Wichmann (at the Robert Koch Institute) told Science that measles vaccinations don’t get done because “parents simply forgot it or did not have time.”

And he and Dr. Marc Sprenger (director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm) think that imposing a mandatory school-attendance vaccination program would violate existing law and Europeans’ sense of ethics.

Dr. Wichmann added that some of Europe’s doctors have not even been vaccinated against measles.

When does personal freedom, gained at the community’s expense, go too far?

I find it surprising that any society would permit its health practitioners to contribute to disease transmission by not receiving vaccinations that science has proven to reduce the burden of infectious illness.

I am also anti-libertarian enough to think that “your” alleged right to be ignorant, stupid, or science-denying should not outweigh my children’s right to be disease-free.

The moral? — The balance between freedom and health often goes too far in un-thinking or anti-thinking directions

Infectious disease is one of the best boundary-placers in ethical thinking. It serves to highlight the extremes that are reached, when competing freedoms and rights have not been properly balanced.

Public health considerations shake some sense into unrealistic ideological thinking.

For example, and pertinent to this essay, medical science has repeatedly proven the exceedingly favorable balance of risks in delivering routine vaccinations.

Kai Kupferschmidt concluded his Science article by quoting Seth Berkley, director of the GAVI Alliance (an organization that tries to immunize third world children):

“I have been in a refugee camp and watched measles come through, and every day I saw the little graves of all the babies who were buried. You don’t forget that.”

Those who seek to escape the minuscule risks of vaccine administration are attempting to freeload on the benefits of herd immunity. They want health, without first undertaking the miniscule risk that everyone else took on by receiving the vaccinations that made herd immunity possible. These shirkers are cowards.

Libertarians’ exclusively self-centered perspective is ethically unworkable on a planet populated by significantly more than just a few clans of widely distributed people. Ape ethics do not apply to a world of 7 billion people.

Europe’s cavalier approach to measles vaccination is impracticable on both utilitarian and thoughtfully considered spiritual grounds. One would think that a rich and sophisticated agglomeration of cultures could do ethically better than they are in controlling a public health threat.

PeteFree.com

Freedom versus Public Health — an Easily Avoidable Measles Epidemic in Europe Has Weakened the World Effort to Rid the Planet of this too Often (Third World) Fatal Disease — Should There Be Limits on Ignorant People’s Perceived Right to Threaten Other People’s Health?