VacTruth Alleges Bullying in One-Sided Account of Nurse-Patient Encounter

Anti-vaccine activists have a love-hate relationship with medical providers, be they nurses, doctors, pharmacists, whatever. They love to hate any medical provider that dares to question their anti-vaccine beliefs. When they encounter someone who strongly urges them to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, the nurse or doctor is invariably described as a "bully", "ignorant", "ill-informed", "brain-washed", "pharma whores" and so on. They push "propaganda" are paid by "Big Pharma". Any interaction is viewed through this lens, that the parent is right and the medical professional is hopelessly benighted or even downright evil. If they happen to have a poor bedside manner, so much the worse, though given how some anti-vaccine activists respond to science-based feedback, I might be a bit short-tempered, too.

Over the weekend, an anti-vaccine blog called VacTruth.com (why must anti-vaccine groups always use such Orwellian names?) posted a story entitled "Bully Nurse Harasses Parents of Unvaccinated Baby at Michigan Hospital". According to the account, an unidentified couple brought their child to an urgent care center in Madison Heights, MI after talking on the phone with a nurse at their pediatrician's office. Their son, called "Oliver" in the article, had cold symptoms, a low fever and an "acne-like" rash on his face. Following the advice, they reportedly went to the Detroit Medical Center at Madison Heights, where the admitting nurse, if the account is to be believed, suspected the child had chicken pox and subsequently harassed, ridiculed and bullied the parents.

Wanted: Varicella zoster virus

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Follow the Bouncing Ball

Back in January, I wrote about an outbreak of chicken pox at a day care facility. The outbreak involved four children, three of whom were siblings. One of the siblings was too young to receive the varicella vaccine. The three other children were all old enough, but their parents had not had them immunized due to a general distrust of vaccines. The facility was unaware that the kids were unimmunized because of two things: a) the parents allegedly faked their children's immunization records and b) the facility reportedly did not do their due diligence to validate the records. To make things worse, two of the day care staff were pregnant, one of whom had an uncertain history of immunity (either by vaccine or infection) to varicella, and thus was at risk for contracting chicken pox and passing it on to her fetus. In addition to increased risks to the mother (PDF), there would also be a risk of congenital varicella syndrome for the unborn child. To top it all off, the state in which this outbreak occurred does not require reporting of chicken pox cases unless they are fatal, so the whole thing may have gone unnoticed by anyone involved with public health.

That last bit is not the case in Alaska, where chicken pox cases are required by regulation to be reported to the Alaska Section of Epidemiology (SOE). I bring this up because, in 2011, Alaska's Kenai Peninsula also saw an outbreak of chicken pox at a day care facility. And, like the outbreak mentioned above, it occurred late in the year and also involved kids whose parents had eschewed vaccination.

Varicella Vaccination Among Older Kids Protects Infants

Turning on the news this morning, I was greeted with a story that caught my ear. Published online, ahead of print, a new study in the journal Pediatrics, "Varicella in Infants After Implementation of the US Varicella Vaccination Program", looked at the incidence of varicella (chickenpox) among infants under 12 months of age.

The varicella vaccine was approved in 1995 and is recommended for all children aged 12 months to 12 years. It is a "live" virus vaccine, meaning that the vaccine uses intact, though weakened, virus particles that grant immunity without causing full-blown disease. Vaccines of this sort are generally more effective than "killed" virus vaccines, which only use part of the virus. Because of the approved age range for the vaccine, it does not provide direct protection to infants under 12 months of age, but it can provide protection through herd immunity.

So what did the researchers find?