Washington state health officials declare whooping cough epidemic, seek CDC help as cases soar

Washington state’s worst outbreak of whooping cough in decades has prompted health officials to declare an epidemic, seek help from federal experts and urge residents to get vaccinated amid worry that cases of the highly contagious disease could spike much higher.

It’s the first state to declare a whooping cough, or pertussis, epidemic since 2010, when California had more than 9,000 cases, including 10 deaths. Washington has had 10 times the cases reported in 2011, and so has Wisconsin with nearly 2,000 cases this year, though that state has not declared an epidemic.

MrShoop's Ad Hominim Discussion Style:
Idiots who...
I don't really need to keep reading past this point, but I did anyway.

...don’t understand the difference between correlation and causation...
You have no facts to make this claim, and I'd guess you haven't researched this topic at all. You have a point of view, and no amount of reason will move you.

...end up creating bureaucracies that waste everyone’s time and money.
Congress created it, after specifically exempting vaccine makers from lawsuits. You'll say it was to stop shyster lawyers, I'll say it was to prevent the facts from coming out and risking the US population's herd immunity due to non-compliance, and we'd both be right.

There is no burden to show causation in the vaccine court.

Really, and you know this how? Be very specific, since you might be swapping posts with someone who knows much more about this topic than you, having witnessed a start to finish case FIRST HAND. Someone who knows that the system is heavily weighted against the plaintiff, ludicrously so.

Your argument style consists of assertions without facts - you really need to read a book or something or take a debate class. You're never too old to learn something.

the concern is that many of the children that come down with whooping cough HAVE been vaccinated.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Not everyone who receives a vaccination responds by building antibodies against the disease. For instance, I have been fully vaccinated against Hepatitis B, but never responded to the vaccine. My friend's son, who was vaccinated against measles, contracted the disease because he never responded to the vaccine.

What protects the entire community, and the “non-responders” is Herd Immunity.

When enough people are vaccinate, who do respond, then the communicable disease has little opportunity to jump from one person to another. Herd immunity increases the likelihood that those who have not responded to the vaccine will not have contact with the disease causing organism. Herd Immunity reduces the chances of an full-blown epidemic.

You compain about sources, while not posting a single one yourself? A little hypocritical?

See paragraph 5 of this article from the New England Journal of Medicine.. Don't get hung up on presence of the word causal, just note how they define it. Note that the standard is lower than for product liability, and all that is needed is to show that a symptom matches one of the listed side effects. That a vaccine court even exists is proof of a certain anti-vaccine hysteria... The vaccine court is only biased against plaintiff if the adverse effect isn't on the list of known effects, which is as it should be. It is biased toward the plaintiff if the claim is on the list because there is presumptive causation based on that correlation, which was my point.

To win a VICP award, the claimant does not need to prove everything that is required to hold a vaccine maker liable in a product liability lawsuit. But a causal connection must be shown. If medical records show that a child had one of several listed adverse effects within a short period after vaccination, the VICP presumes that it was caused by the vaccine (although the government can seek to prove otherwise). An advisory committee helps to amend the list of adverse effects as the consensus view changes with the availability of new studies. If families claim that a vaccine caused an adverse effect that is not on the list, the burden of proof rests with them. Autism is not on the list for any vaccine, and the VICP has rejected about 300 such claims outright.

source: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078168

To clear one thing up, are you part of the vaccine causes autism crowd or not? The vaccine court issue is a distraction to the bigger issue: the bogus claim that vaccines cause autism, which is scaring people away from having their children vaccinated...

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