On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report calling for any U.S. citizen traveling to Europe to make sure their vaccinations were up to date, specifically highlighting the need to make sure one has received his or her MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) immunization. This is because of huge measles outbreaks around the globe. Madagascar has been hit with over 100,000 confirmed cases, and the Ukraine has a reported 42,874 from the start of this year through April. That number is set to dwarf Ukraine’s 53,218 number from last year. The large outbreak in the Ukraine has helped triple the measles rate in Europe, leading pediatric infectious disease specialist Nataliya Vynnyk at Children’s Clinical Hospital in Kyiv to tell Science Magazine that, “The current epidemic is the most massive in the entire postvaccine period.”
The United States is seeing its worst outbreak in well over 25 years. What is driving this outbreak? Low vaccination rates, much of which is driven by an anti-vaxxer sentiment being promoted around the world. Buzzfeed reports on a new global study that, on the the positive side, shows 79% of planet earth inhabitants believe vaccinations are safe. The drawback is that when going through each country, that number dips in some disappointing ways. While 98% of people in Bangladesh trust in vaccination safety, only a third of French respondents to the study do not believe that vaccinations are safe—France is in the middle of one of their largest outbreaks. The number of Ukrainians who believe vaccinations are safe is about half.
A large part of this movement away from science comes from anti-vaxxer misinformation campaigns that have taken hold. And to be fair to the Ukrainian population, there is evidence that larger internal struggles of political upheaval factor in both the outbreak and general distrust of vaccinations. The country has faced shortages in the vaccines over the last few years, as well as smaller outbreaks in more rural regions where issues like power outages may have led to ineffective vaccines being given.
But, the United States and France do not have these same excuses for glomming onto anti-science positions. Instead, our “developed” countries have begun to allow bad science to take hold, in many cases for the political benefit of (predominantly) conservative lawmakers.