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David Shaw's avatar

The casual research I did on cholera outbreaks in Randolph County, Illinois produced suggestive evidence that the 1849 outbreak began near the Mississippi River and that the infected people either lived near the river or traveled to that location on business. So rather than the disease spreading, it may be that people were traveling to the disease and returning home with it. There is no evidence in that locality so far that it disproportionately affected people according to social rank, wealth or slave status. There is a monument near Germantown, Illinois thanking God that the cholera plague stopped there. Germantown is 40 miles east of the Mississippi River.

I expect measles outbreaks in the US to get worse as the baby boomers with natural immunity "age out" of the population leaving only people with the lesser vaccine immunity. The measles vaccine fails 5% of the time so that is a population of 16 million who had the vaccine but can get measles. The states where measles has broken out in recent years are primarily border states with high levels of unvaccinated immigrants. If Amish and Mennonites were the problem we would see a different geographic distribution of cases in alignment with those populations.

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Melissa Scheller's avatar

The measles outbreak in Texas is from a religious faction, Mennonites, who have never taken vaccines. So all the free healthcare and education isn’t going to change that. In Texas we also have a huge influx of illegal immigrants. Why were they not required to be up to date on vaccines before entering our country? Our children can’t easily attend school without being up to date or having an exemption but non citizens were free flowing in? That’s a huge part of this outbreaks cause.

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