Measles – spot check from the HPA
During the recent binge-posting furore surrounding Jeni Barnett and MMR the candidate for Most Used Graph probably went to this little piccie.
While nicely highlighting the clear ‘very worrying’ spike of measles in 2008 and being perfect ammunition to lob at Jeni Barnett it doesn’t give the full picture for 2008. I posted about this (Measles oop north) in January and the real danger looked to be in April/May 2008 when measles was relentlessly climbing. However, by late summer the worse of it had passed in London village if not in the rest of England & Wales.
I am not entirely sure of the kind of disease modelling used but it seems reasonable to speculate that measles foments in a high population low vaccine area like London before spreading across the rest of the UK. Given the drop in London over the summer we might have expected rates in the rest of England to fall as well.
The HPA have just posted the most recent measles surveillance data.
It’s good news. The measles rate outside of London has dropped off a cliff. So is this spike and drop a natural pattern associated with lower levels of disease in a part-immunised community? Or maybe disaster was looming and the MMR catch-up campaign kicked in just in the nick of time…
Sadly, the headline ‘Measles Falling as Vaccination Works” won’t make the news and it won’t get blogged about much either. It is encouraging to see the rates come down but I will refer back to the Most Used Graph – it would be much more reassuring to get back to pre-2006 rates and the risks are still very real.
Nice post Northern Doctor.
Re: “Sadly, the headline ‘Measles Falling as Vaccination Works” won’t make the news and it won’t get blogged about much either.” Google News doesn’t seem to be showing any reports of this in the Mainstream Media yet. The same goes for a Google Blog search (with the exception of this post, obviously).
It looks like an example of how the media works – there was an HPA press release in February when all the outlets picked it up. It looks like the usual churnalism – the media have to be spoonfed and rarely go looking for it. And the broad message – “small disaster, not many killed” doesn’t really fit their remit.
I’ve just started Flat Earth News by Nick Davies so I will go off and quietly harrumph a bit more.