Two measles cases in north east

pete_inthehills

what's the problem with measles?

My siblings gave me measles when I was only 6 months old and it never bothered me.

Or is modern measles more viralent that in the old days.

pete
inthehills

baldowrie

It's not the cute little childhood illness is portrayed as. An old neighbour of mine was left totally deaf by it, but he didn't die as he was expected to!

Complications with measles are relatively common, ranging from relatively mild and less serious diarrhea, to pneumonia and encephalitis (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), corneal ulceration leading to corneal scarring. Complications are usually more severe amongst adults who catch the virus.

The fatality rate from measles for otherwise healthy people in developed countries is 3 deaths per thousand cases.[4] In underdeveloped nations with high rates of malnutrition and poor healthcare, fatality rates have been as high as 28%. In immunocompromised patients, the fatality rate is approximately 30 percent.

lachlanandmarcus

A friend at university was virtually wheelchair bound by the measles he caught as a small child. Most people throw the illness off but it can be devastating.

Martin

It can be devastating, but being of the generation that took you round to a measles infected friend's for tea to make sure you "got measles over with", I think they do protest too much - the only childhood disease that I suffered badly from was chicken pox which I didn't get until my 30's - kids, if in general good health can in almost all cases shrug all the common childhood diseases off - measles, mumps, german measles, chicken pox etc.
Having survived the polio epidemics unvaccinated, a measle does not appear a great threat........
(father considered the polio vaccine dangerous, and refused to let me be vaccinated, for which I shall be forever grateful - several friends got the disease from the crude vaccine and were crippled for life....)

baldowrie

My neighbour was of the 'generation that got measles' he was fit and healthy and his brother and sister had no complications. I think rather than 'they protest too much' there was no choice in those years and you tried to ensure your child caught at a stage in their lives that they had more of a chance to recover with no complications, which didn't always work out and of course the complications were not talked about or made widely known.

The added complication is for those adults and teenagers who for some reason were immune to it as a child and are at risk in their adult years. Then all these so called childhood diseases become extremely dangerous. My brother was one. He got Chicken pox aged 20 and was within days of being hospitalised, we got him to an emergency doctor in time to prevent pneumonia. He also got measles and was immediately put onto antibiotics and a daily nurse came to check on him. Another friend of mine caught chicken pox, again didn't catch it as a child despite his brother and sister having it He was hospitalised within 2 days of the spots coming out and on life support for a week in the high depenancy unit. It was touch and go for the first 48 hours. He was and is fit, healthy. As a farmer he worked out side and is always on the go.

Vaccines are use as the herd prevention and not just for the single prevention. Vacinnating children, when it is appropriate to do so, prevent complications the majoirty of the time in themsleves and for the more vunerable in the wider community.

I had meseals, mumps, rubbella, chicken pox. But I was one of the luckier ones and had not comlications despite suffering for 10 weeks with chickenpox followed imediately by mumps. But that's not the case for every one.

The attitude of 'oh they will get over it' is not as high as it was because we are more informed that not everyone does and we need to watch for complications.

Just to add there is reason why these 'childhood diseases' are reportable to your GP and so on. And don't forget up until not so many years ago flu killed in it's thousands. It's still a killer but we have the knowledge and drugs to help prevent death, including vaccination in the susceptible.

Ina

Yeah, I think folk just don't have the stamina to deal with it anymore the way we did when we were young... I never heard of any case with complications back then - we just all got it.

Esther.R

My mum qualified as a physio in the early 60s, she remembers the awful experience of working with wards full of kids with measles encephalitis (sp?) who all either died or were left brain damaged. Terrifying disease when it does go badly.

monkey nuts

I caught measles from my sister when I was about about 4 or 5. We both had pneumonia because of it. It has left us both prone to chest infections (my sisyer more so as she is a smoker) but otherwise we had no other problems.

baldowrie

As I said earlier, the complications were not widely broadcast

Townie

I caught measles when I was 21 and it was the worst thing ever..took 2 weeks to disappear.

I had really bad flu like symptoms, I remember my eyes being extremely sensitive to light and a bright red rashy spots under the skin, and when they subsided left me covered in bruising (like lovebites lol)

I didnt realise it could be as serious as mentioned above, but then we didnt have the internet/computer when I was 21, just my mum's trusty old dog ear'd medical book.

Ina

It's known to be more serious when you get it as an adult. Maybe we had a different type of measles in Germany?

Sassinak

LOL what do you call German measles in Germany? Is it just Rubella?

Ina

Nope - Rubella is something different! I had both. And there is no such thing as German measles in Germany.

Sassinak

Yes I knew that Rubella wasn't the measles that were being talked about.
It was just word association - Germany + measles lol
Rubella is commonly known as German measles, but assumed that it wasn't in Germany

Ina

baldowrie

found this on Yahoo, should explain why it's called German Measles at times

Friedrich Hoffmann made a clinical description of rubella in 1740. Later descriptions by de Bergen in 1752 and Orlow in 1758 supported the belief that this was a derivative of measles. In 1814, George de Maton first suggested that it be considered a disease distinct from both measles and scarlet fever. All these physicians were German, and the disease was known medically as Rötheln (from the German name Röteln), hence the common name of "German measles".

English Royal Artillery surgeon, Henry Veale, observed an outbreak in India. He coined the euphonious name "rubella" (from the Latin, meaning "little red") in 1866. It was formally recognized as an individual entity in 1881, at the International Congress of Medicine in London. In 1914, Alfred Fabian Hess theorised that rubella was caused by a virus, based on work with monkeys.[8] In 1938, Hiro and Tosaka confirmed this by passing the disease to children using filtered nasal washings from acute cases.

In 1940, there was a widespread epidemic of rubella in Australia. Subsequently, opthalmologist Norman McAllister Gregg found 78 cases of congenital cataracts in infants and 68 of them were born to mothers who had caught rubella in early pregnancy. Gregg published an account, Congenital Cataract Following German Measles in the Mother, in 1941. He described a variety of problems now know as congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) and noticed that the earlier the mother was infected, the worse the damage was. The virus was isolated in tissue culture in 1962 by two separate groups led by physicians Parkman and Weller.

There was a pandemic of rubella between 1962 and 1965, starting in Europe and spreading to the United States. In the years 1964-65, the United States had an estimated 12.5 million rubella cases. This led to 11,000 miscarriages or therapeutic abortions and 20,000 cases of congenital rubella syndrome. Of these, 2,100 died as neonates, 12,000 were deaf, 3,580 were blind and 1,800 were mentally retarded. In New York alone, CRS affected 1% of all births.

In 1969 a live attenuated virus vaccine was licensed. In the early 1970s, a triple vaccine containing attenuated measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) viruses was introduced.

Ina

Ah - thank you!

khitajrah

When I was pregnant with my first they checked my rubella immunity - I wasn't immune so after the birth they offered me the vaccine. I declined as I wasn't planning to have any more children. 6 years later I became pregnant with my second and they checked my immunity again - oddly enough I was immune. They said I'd contracted the illness - it must have been mild because I never noticed it!