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To the Parent of the Unvaccinated Child Who Exposed My Family to Measles

by CaridadSleeman Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: The author is a pediatrician in Phoenix. A version of this letter first appeared in the Jacks’ CareBridge Journal for their sick daughter, Maggie.

To the parent of the unvaccinated child who exposed my family to measles:

I have a number of strong feelings surging through my body right now. Towards my family, I am feeling extra protective like a papa bear. Towards you, unvaccinating parent, I feel anger and frustration at your choices.

More stories on vaccines and outbreaks:


Vaccines Work. These 8 Charts Prove It.


Map: The High Cost of Vaccine Hysteria


How Many People Arenâ&#128;&#153;t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State?


Measles Cases in the US are at a 20-Year High. Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers.


This PBS Special Makes The Most Powerful Argument For Vaccines Yet


Mickey Mouse Still Stricken With Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers


If You Distrust Vaccines, You’re More Likely to Think NASA Faked the Moon Landings

By now we’ve all heard of the measles outbreak that originated in Disneyland. Or more accurately, originated from an unvaccinated person that infected other similarly minded vacationers. I won’t get into a debate about the whole anti-vaccine movement, the thimerisol controversy (no longer even used in childhood vaccines), or the myth that MMR causes autism (there are changes in autistic brain chemistry prior to birth).

Let’s talk measles for just a minute. It once was widespread in the US. It is now considered ‘eliminated’ in the US (not continually circulating in the population – only contracted through travel out of country). Measles is highly contagious (>90 percent infectious) and can survive airborne in a room and infect someone two hours later. Another fun fact is that measles is transmittable before it can be diagnosed – four days before the characteristic rash appears. “Measles itself is unpleasant, but the complications are dangerous. Six to 20 percent of the people who get the disease will get an ear infection, diarrhea, or even pneumonia. One out of 1000 people with measles will develop inflammation of the brain, and about one out of 1000 will die.” That sounds fun!

Ok.

Calm down, self.

I assume you love your child just like I love mine. I assume that you are trying to make good choices regarding their care. Please realize that your child does not live in a bubble. When your child gets sick, other children are exposed. My children. Why would you knowingly expose anyone to your sick, unvaccinated child after recently visiting Disneyland? That was a bone-headed move.

Why does this effect me and mine? Why is my family at risk if we are vaccinating? I’m glad you asked.

Regarding measles, there are four groups of people.

All are represented in my family.

First, the MMR vaccine results in immunity for most who receive it. Two doses provides protection that can be confirmed with blood titers. My wife is in this group.

Second, about 3% of fully vaccinated children do not develop a lasting immune response. They have low blood titers and are not protected against measles. If exposed, this group will likely get the illness. I am in this group. I was thankfully not exposed.

Third, we have the unvaccinated. My son, Eli, is ten months old. He is too young to received the MMR vaccine and thus has no protection. Whether by refusal or because they are too young, exposed unvaccinated children have a 90 percent chance of getting measles.

Fourth, there are children like my Maggie. These are children who can’t be vaccinated. Children who have cancer. Children who are immunocompromised. Children who are truly allergic to a vaccine or part of a vaccine (i.e anaphylaxis to egg). These children remain at risk. They cannot be protected, except by vaccinating people around them.

Maggie, before and after being diagnosed with cancer.

Maggie was diagnosed last August with ALL—acute lymphoblastic leukemia (blood cancer). She has had multipe rounds of chemotherapy, lumbar punctures, and surgery to implant her port. She has been admitted six times since diagnosis and spent over three weeks at Phoenix Children’s Hospital (including Halloween and New Years). She had been immunized fully, but we are unable to immunize her further until after treatments end. Her treatment will prayerfully end shortly after her 5th birthday, in January 2017.

Here is how the measles outbreak has further complicated our situation.

It was a Wednesday. Maggie had just been discharged from Phoenix Children’s Hospital after finishing her latest round of chemotherapy. That afternoon she went to the PCH East Valley Specialty Clinic for a lab draw. Everything went fine, and we were feeling good…until Sunday evening when we got the call. On Wednesday afternoon, Anna, Maggie, and Eli had been exposed to measles by another patient. Our two kids lacked the immunity to defend against measles. The only protection available was multiple shots of rubeola immune globulin (measles antibodies). There were three shots for Maggie and two shots for Eli. They screamed, but they now have some temporary protection against measles. We pray it is enough.

Eli getting multiple shots of measles antibodies

Eli and Maggie were exposed to measles on January 21. Despite the treatment noted, they could start showing signs of measles any time from now through February 11 (21 days post exposure). After a new blood test, both my wife and I were found to be immune to measles, but the children will remain in isolation until February 11.

Unvaccinating parent, thanks for screwing up our three-week “vacation” from chemotherapy. Instead of a break, we get to watch for measles symptoms and pray for no fevers (or back to the hospital we go). Thanks for making us cancel our trip to the snow this year. Maggie really wanted to see snow, but we will not risk exposing anyone else. On that note, thanks for exposing 195 children to an illness considered ‘eliminated’ from the US. Your poor choices don’t just effect your child. They affect my family and many more like us.

Please forgive my sarcasm. I am upset and just a little bit scared.

Papa bear

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To the Parent of the Unvaccinated Child Who Exposed My Family to Measles

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No, Saudi TV Didn’t Blur Out Michelle Obama’s Face When the President Met King Salman

by BrittAfford Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Twitter is hopping right now about how Saudi TV allegedly blurred Michelle Obama’s face, thanks to this YouTube video:

Only it’s bullshit. The YouTube uploader appears to have added the blur, not some Saudi TV network.

(Here is another video the YouTuber uploaded that’s blurred.)

This version shows no such blur:

Nothing is real on the internet.

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No, Saudi TV Didn’t Blur Out Michelle Obama’s Face When the President Met King Salman

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This Is an Early Contender for the Worst #SOTU Tweet of the Night

by DavidaOJNum Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

If you are one of those people who enjoys watching congressmen and women make fools of themselves—and you are—then things like the State of the Union are precious delicacies to be savored. The stately class dolls themselves in hashtags and tweets their “smart takes” and insightful “jokes” out into the world so they can inevitably get pulled over by the information superhighway police for being despicable, stupid, and possibly racist.

The SOTU isn’t for a few more hours but we’ve already got an early contender for the night’s worst tweet from a sitting member of Congress. Quoth Rep. Steve King (R-Pleasantville):

“A deportable”!

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This Is an Early Contender for the Worst #SOTU Tweet of the Night

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 January 2015

by PedroFljuqey Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s Hopper in the sewing room, surrounded by sewing paraphernalia. That look in her eye suggests either that her brother was somewhere nearby or that she was just about to gallop across all of Marian’s stuff and make a huge mess. Or maybe both. Making a mess is a favorite pastime around here these days.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 January 2015

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People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

by LillianJacob Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dozens of demonstrations have been developing around the world in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre in Paris at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where masked gunmen murdered 12 and injured 10 others. French newspaper Le Monde is tracking the growing number of rallies, including those in Berlin, London, New York, and Montreal.

In Paris on Wednesday evening, a crowd reportedly numbering in the thousands gathered at Place de la Republique, rallying in solidarity around the phrase “Je Suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” Some raised pens in tribute to the slain cartoonists.

There was also a stirring tribute from the entire newsroom of Agence France-Presse on Wednesday:

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People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 January 2015

by KimCollette Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let’s start off 2015 right. Today Hilbert gets catblogging all to himself. Why? Because he’s just that magnificent, that’s why. This is sort of a reverse-selfie, the kind of picture Hilbert would take if he didn’t have a servant to take it for him. But he does. Life is good.

Of course, he doesn’t quite have catblogging all to himself. Hopper is back there waiting her turn. How did she manage to photobomb this picture? That’s easy. Around here, if you just point a camera randomly in any direction, you have at least even odds of a cat showing up. This is the sign of a properly run household.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 January 2015

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India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan

by JillianKuykenda Posted on December 2, 2014

India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan

By on 2 Dec 2014commentsShare

India is poised to unveil a new climate plan as soon as January, an Indian business publication is reporting. That’s yet another bit of good news that makes a 2015 global climate agreement look just a little more likely.

Up until now, India, the third-largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, has been resistant to calls for limiting emissions. But when the U.S. and China, the two largest climate polluters, announced an agreement to curb their emissions last month, the world’s eyes turned toward the third country in line.

India’s announcement could come this January, when President Obama visits the country at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The plan “is likely to include an ‘aspirational’ peaking year for India’s greenhouse gas emissions,” writes the Indian Business Standard, which attributes the scoop to three anonymous sources in Modi’s government. The report continues:

The process to make fresh and enhanced commitments to the international community was in the works for the past few months, with the government commissioning studies to assess and project India’s greenhouse gas emissions. The results of these studies are due in December. A joint US-China announcement has incentivised India to make an early announcement in this regard.

Though the announcements by the US and China weren’t seen as ambitious by the Indian government, these were appreciated for their political significance. …

A source in the government said, “The consultations have begun for it. We should be able to narrow down on the nature of targets we should aspire to. It is likely to include an indicative year by which India’s emissions could peak, as well as a fresh target for lowering the economy’s carbon intensity.”

India’s timeline (that is, its timeline for announcing its pollution-cutting timeline) fits with what U.N. climate negotiators are hoping for. Countries are supposed to announce their emission-reduction goals — their “intended nationally determined contributions,” referred to as INDCs or NDCs — by March 2015. Then, if all goes according to plan, in December of next year world leaders will commit, at a big U.N. climate summit in Paris, to hold one another to their INDCs. The criteria that negotiators will use to evaluate whether each country’s INDC is appropriate — i.e., whether each country is actually pulling its weight — is one of many items on the agenda at this week’s climate conference in Lima, Peru.

Of course, this initial Business Standard report won’t quite have climate hawks doing gleeful backflips. There are still big questions, like, when will this “‘aspirational’ peaking year” be? How high will emissions be allowed to rise before they peak? And how probable is it that India will even achieve its aspirations? Many are worried that the countries that have yet to make commitments will allow their emissions to peak too late or too high. Greenpeace noted in a recent working paper on its hopes for Lima that “Countries should neither be allowed to come up with too many different timelines for their commitments, nor should the targets be locked in for 2030, as there is a real risk of the targets being too low, in which case low ambition would be locked in for 15 crucial years.” But there’s a possibility that India will do both.

Still, India has historically been granted more leeway than other countries because of its deep poverty and its comparatively low per-capita emissions. Around 300 million of its more than 1.2 billion people don’t have electricity, and giving them access to it could lead India’s emissions to balloon for decades to come. Recognizing this possibility, the U.N. came up with an unrealistic but not impossible model for how the world could avoid catastrophic climate change while India’s emissions continue to grow substantially as it hooks its poor up to power.

But it’s not a foregone conclusion that India’s development has to come hand-in-hand with greater emissions, nor is it a given that the Indian people will want it to. The country is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and its major cities already deal on a regular basis with air pollution levels that put Beijing to shame; the capital is considering a plan to close schools on days when pollution poses a high risk to human health. (Indians checking the day’s Google Weather forecast for New Delhi will often find that it’s “Smoke.”) India’s plans to double coal production in the next five years won’t help. But its plans to rapidly expand solar energy, which Modi’s delegation intends to tout in Lima, will.

So even though a lot is still up in the air (ahem) with regard to India’s future, the Business Standard report is another positive development in what’s starting to resemble a trend: The biggest greenhouse gas emitters are stepping up and demonstrating that they’re doing something to tackle this looming threat, even if not yet enough. This year has seen China, the U.S., and the European Union (the latter of which, if taken as a single entity, pollutes more than India) announce new goals and timelines. Now India may follow suit. Who’s next?

Source:
India may set bigger climate change targets before Obama’s R-Day visit

, Business Standard.

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

by LilyRapphshaum Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress earlier this month, they won an important new power: They can change how Congress does math.

Seriously. Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), their budget guru, are considering altering the way Congress calculates the costs of tax cuts—a move that could make big tax cuts for the rich appear less costly than they really are.

Here’s how it would work. In January, Republicans will be in charge of Congress. And that includes the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which calculates how tax laws affect revenue, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces official budget projections. Right now, when the CBO and the JCT calculate the impact of tax laws on government income, they consider how Americans might alter their behavior in response to tax rate changes. But the tax-math bodies do not evaluate how tax legislation could affect economic growth—largely because those sorts of impacts are hard to predict. Republicans have long claimed that tax cuts lead to greater economic activity that inexorably yields more tax revenues—a point much disputed. But Ryan, who in January will head up the House Ways and Means committee—which has jurisdiction over tax reform—and his fellow GOPers are looking to enshrine this Republican belief into the hard and fast calculations of Capitol Hill’s number-crunchers.

Last THIS week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Ryan said he will push to make sure that the two congressional budget scorekeepers use this accounting method when evaluating GOP tax reform legislation. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who will chair the Senate finance committee starting in January, said last week that he was open to implementing the change.

Ryan and Hatch can implement dynamic scoring by simply ordering the two budget scorekeepers to accept this budgeting method. Not only that, Republicans can require the CBO and JCT to use very optimistic assumptions about how tax cuts affect the economy—including people’s motivation to work, the response of the Federal Reserve, and household and business decisions on how much to work, save, and invest. Budget analysts then plug those assumptions into several models estimating economic growth, and GOPers can cherry-pick the model that produces the largest number. “The risk is that a Congress that is politically motivated takes the most unrealistic models and plugs in highly rosy assumptions,” says Chye-Ching Huang, a budget expert at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If Republicans don’t want to make these complex choices themselves, they can install directors at the CBO and JCT who they think will use the kind of assumptions they like, Huang adds. Neither congressional Dems nor President Barack Obama can prevent any of this.

Republicans have pushed for this budget-math tweak since the Reagan days. And for years, policy wonks have debated the merits of this novel budgeting method, known as dynamic scoring. Kenneth Kies, a GOP-nominated former director of the JCT, told the Washington Examiner last week that this accounting trick falls “somewhere between pure mathematics and theology.” Because this arcane tweak can make tax cuts for the wealthy appear to cost the government less than they actually do, it is extremely appealing to Republicans. If they make this change, they could argue that new tax cuts would partly pay for themselves.

Democrats say the budgeting trick is a gimmick designed to allow Republicans to chop taxes for the rich without paying the political cost. Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

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The Feds Are Demanding That Twitter Turn Over More User Info Than Ever

by Jeffry8238 Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are hitting Twitter with more information requests about its users than ever before, and in most cases the social network is handing over some data, according to a new report released by the company on Thursday. Twitter notes that many of the government demands, which are typically related to criminal investigations, are originating from California, New York, and Virginia. They’re coming from federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence officials, a Twitter spokesman says.

Like several other tech companies, Twitter releases transparency reports disclosing information about the government requests for user data it has received. According to the latest report, between January 1 and June 30, Twitter received just over 2,000 requests for information covering about 3,100 Twitter accounts from authorities in 54 countries, with about 1,250 of those requests coming from US agencies. That’s a sharp increase from the previous six months, when there were about 1,400 requests, around 830 of those from the US. According to the Twitter spokesman, US authorities have placed more information requests over the last six months than the company has ever received in a similar timeframe.

While Twitter granted zero requests to some countries that requested information recently, such as Turkey, Venezuela, and Pakistan, the social network handed over at least some information in 72 percent of the cases when US authorities requested it.

While the social network can report a tally of law enforcement-related requests, the social network is barred by the US government from publishing the specific number of national security-related requests—such as national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders—it has received. Twitter notes that it met with the FBI and the Justice Department earlier this year to push for more transparency.

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The Feds Are Demanding That Twitter Turn Over More User Info Than Ever

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"Make It a Quickie," "Get Paid for Doing It," and Other Advice From San Francisco’s Water Agency

by UQEEmiliojhttek Posted on July 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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In response to California’s ongoing drought, San Francisco’s water agency has come out with a hilariously creepy ad campaign to make saving water sexy. In addition to the commercial above, featuring a water-efficient showerhead being stroked and a seductive male voice telling you to “screw them on,” ads encourage water users to “Make it a quickie” and “Get paid for doing it” (“it” referring to your shower and the replacement of your old toilet, respectively).

Unfortunately, new data from the state’s Water Resources Control Board shows that Californians need to be “doing it” a lot more. Gov. Jerry Brown requested that Californians voluntarily reduce their water usage by 20 percent in January, when he declared the drought to have reached a state of emergency. But the Control Board found that, as of April, Californians had reduced their water usage by only 5 percent, and Bay Area residents had reduced by only 2 percent. The state has yet to enforce mandatory water restrictions, though a handful of cities have. Listen to KQED’s deep dive on water reduction here.

And, in the name of water reduction, here are a few more ads:

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"Make It a Quickie," "Get Paid for Doing It," and Other Advice From San Francisco’s Water Agency

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