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So it struck me that the title of the panel, "The Anti-Anti Vax" is...
a llitle bit torturous and really what that means is Pro Vaccination.
So I wanted to refocus the discussion at least for a very short bit on why...
we care about this entire situation.
So ya know medical progress has been phenomenal over the past century.
We can save the lives of children born at 300 grams.
We turned childhood leukemia from a disease that was almost...
uniformly fatal into one that has a survival rate of greater than 80%.
We transplant entire human organs and in critical care we've got...
machines that can keep you alive for weeks, even after...
your lungs have stopped and your heart has stopped beating.
But they all pale in comparison to the impact of vaccination.
In fact if you want to do the greatest amount of good...
with the least risk and cost you would be really hard pressed...
to find anything better than vaccination.
To really understand the impact you don't have to go any further...
than the very first vaccine and that was the one against smallpox...
of course. It was a plague on humanity. It's been...
with us more than 10,000 years.
And the world being, as it was point out earlier, "only...
6000 years old" I know that's just a fascinating fact.
[laughter]
Um but it killed about 30% of the people infected...
and over the course of human history has claimed the lives...
of an estimated 300,000,000 people.
Since the vaccine was first developed by Edward Jenner in 1796...
it was sporadically used but by 1949 the United States...
had seen it's last case of natural smallpox.
But the effort to eradicate smallpox was really undertaken in earnest...
in 1967 and that was with the...
"Intensified Global Eradication Project"
At that point we still saw 10-15 million people per year getting...
infected by smallpox and that was spread over 31 countries.
So for 10 years we had response teams racing across continents...
to areas of smallpox outbreaks, vaccinating everybody around the...
afflicted people to prevent the spread and after 10 years...
it payed off.
This is Ali Maalin he was a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia and...
he was the last human being on earth to naturally contract smallpox.
We monitored for 2 more years and in Dec 9 1979...
the World Health Assembly officially declared smallpox eradicated.
A disease that wiped out 300 million people over our history...
at a cost of 23 million dollars per year.
Only 23 million dollars per year world wide effort was able to...
eradicate it forever.
[applause]
In these last 2 centuries we made phenomenal progress.
We have over 2 dozen different diseases that are...
vaccine preventable at this point. 15 of them are part of our...
childhood immunization schedule and every single one of these...
has been phenomenally successful. They changes the face of the way...
we practice pediatrics.
This is a chart showing just 10 of these vaccine preventable diseases.
In the left hand column you see the avg incidence of disease...
from each one of them before the institution of vaccination...
and the next column you see is 2007 the incidences we (almost) currently...
experience in the United States.
Just to put that into perspective, that's a potential over 1,100,000 cases...
of vaccine preventable disease from these 10 alone and remember...
this is an incomplete list vs only about 11,000 that we had to deal with.
But that's about 1,000,000 children a year from these alone...
that don't have to take antibiotics it they were appropriate.
Wouldn't need to be hospitalized,
wouldn't need to risk being disfigured or die all because we vaccinated
And there is more hope on the way.
There are two more diseases scheduled for eradication, Polio and measles.
Polio was the first one added to the chopping block back in 1988.
At that point it was paralyzing about 1,000 children a day around the world.
And now as of 2008 after 2 billion childhood immunizations...
being distributed around the world we saw only 1,652 cases.
In the 20 years this program has been active, it has prevented...
an estimated 5 million cases of paralysis and 250,000 deaths.
[applause]
Measles is the next one. Measles remains the 2nd leading cause...
of infectious disease death world wide.
At the turn of this past century, just 9 years ago, it was still killing about...
a million children a year, give or take.
Since the beginning of the measles initiative in 2001 that rate has been...
steadily dropping and we have a stated goal of 90% reduction by...
2010 next year. We are unlikely to make that goal unfortunately...
and eradication by 2015, we still may have time.
We have the money to do this. Was have the technology to do this.
All we is the public will to eradicate these diseases from the world again.
And yet here we are. Standing here discussing the continuing fall out...
from a very large very coordinated and motivated group of individuals...
who oppose vaccination.
Most of them unified by the erroneous belief that something about the...
vaccines, some form of toxin or interaction from the vaccines...
is causing autism. All with zero evidence to support that base claim.
This information they are spreading is reducing our vaccination rates,
it's costing us herd immunity and it's causing the resurgence of...
vaccine preventable disease.
And this is why we care as physicians and as skeptics.
Children are dying as a direct result of a lack of critical thinking.
And we can make a difference. You can make a difference.
We need help within medicine. Everyone in here... the parents of children...
the brothers and sisters...the coworkers and friends of people...
who are not vaccinating and the information from you,
coming straight from you can do more to change their mind...
than studies, data and professional opinions sometimes ever will.
So I'm going to end with this. This is the Jenny McCarthy Body Count...
as was previously mentioned by Derek over here, who you will hear from...
in just a minute. So I'll just end by pleading you to keep in mind...
of the many, many things that are being sacrificed that we'll talk about...
these children don't need to be hurt anymore.
Thank you.
[applause]
(Close Captioning provided by ~Malfeitor)