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Faunsdale, AL | Junk
You don’t want to give much credit to vaccination for saving lives and increasing our “health and longevity”
Take a look at this chart of measles cases and death rate from 1919 to 2024
The thing to notice is the two lines on the graph are roughly trending downward at the same rate until after the early 2000’s. Then there’s a divergence where case numbers have stopped decreasing and increased slightly but deaths have declined.
What does that mean? It means that science and sanitation and nutrition and all the other advances preventing measles deaths does not improve death rates for all that time except by preventing the spread of the disease.
There might have been a slight trend line break in death rate in the 1940’s when penicillin came into use ushering in the antibiotic era, but it’s not really noticeable as different from the trend line from 1919.
For all this time the most important determinant of how many people (mostly children) die from measles is how many get the disease in the first place. The two lines of cases and deaths roughly parallel each other, certainly from 1963 to about 2000
Of all the interventions that science and technology have brought about to combat measles incidence, vaccination is the only one that has much of an effect. You cannot effectively quarantine your way out of an outbreak as evidenced by our current one in Texas, New Mexico and Kansas. You can’t sanitize or clean your way out of it either. It’s an airborne virus and spreads more easily than any other virus we know and doesn’t depend on contaminated surfaces or contaminated water or food. It’s not spread by insect bites or by animal contact, just by aerosols shed by an infected person. Good nutrition certainly helps survival rates if you compare malnutrition to good nutrition but it does not affect the disease incidence one whit. Luckily poor nutrition has not been a major factor in death rates here in the USA during the time we’re looking at. If it were the case the trend of deaths would be declining steeper than the trend of cases.
The most noticeable break in the case number trend is after 1963 when the first measles vaccines began to be used. Before that time, everyone or almost everyone got infected and some fraction died.
Unfortunately the improvement in survival rate didn’t break trend with the improvement in case numbers until after 2000.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death
Edited by ccjersey 3/30/2025 00:31
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Please believe in science.
