Measles Vaccine Developer Warns Jewish Anti-Vaxxers

This article was originally published in The Times of Israel.

An illustrative photo of a patient receiving a vaccination. (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90/File)

With almost no measles in the United States since the 1990s, today’s generation of American parents are not familiar with the disease and buy in too easily to the anti-vaccination movement currently in vogue, said measles vaccine developer Dr. Samuel Katz.

“Unless you have worked in Sub-Saharan Africa, you have no anxiety to protect against it,” Katz said.

The last surviving member of the team of researchers that developed the measles vaccine 50 years ago believes it is “ludicrous,” however, to get upset over the Center for Disease Control’s December 5 announcement that there were 175 casesof the disease in the United States in 2013, a tripling of the annual average.

Notably, 58 of those cases were among Hasidic Jews in the Brooklyn’s Boro Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods. It was the largest outbreak of measles in the US since 1996.

“It’s all so relative,” said Katz, who was honored last week by the CDC. “True, there were 175 cases in the US so far this year, but there are 3-4 million cases a year worldwide. In Western Europe alone there are 25,000 cases per year.”

On an average day, 430 children die of measles worldwide. In 2011, there were an estimated 158,000 measles deaths.

In a phone interview with The Times of Israel, Katz, professor emeritus of pediatrics at Duke University, emphasized that the measles cases in the US were all the result of the importation of the virus from other countries.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

 

 

Don’t Steer Me Wrong

This post first appeared as “Feds Probe Columbia for Illegal ‘Steering'” on The Shmooze blog of the Forward.

Barnard College

The Columbia Spectator has reported that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating a complaint made against Columbia University on behalf a Jewish Barnard College student. The student was allegedly “steered” away from taking a course with a professor who is known for being critical of Israel and who has been accused of anti-Semitism. “Steering” is considered a form of illegal discrimination and a violation of civil rights.

The complaint was filed with the OCR by Kenneth Marcus, the director of the Initiative on Anti-Semitism at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research after he was informed of the incident by Mailman School of Public Health professor Judith Jacobson, who had heard about it from a third party. The student, whose name has not been revealed, is reportedly supportive of the actions that have been taken on her behalf.

The complaint alleges that last January, Professor Rachel McDermott, then-chair of Barnard’s Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures department, discouraged the student from taking a class with Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia.

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© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Leaking Breasts And Empty Arms

This article was first published as “Rare Genetic Disease Didn’t Deter Family” in The Jewish Week.

Randi Chapnik Myers, Rob Myers and their children at daughter Rachel's bat mitzvah in Toronto last June

Once Randi Chapnik Myers gave birth to a healthy son in 1996 and a healthy daughter in 1998, she and her husband, Rob, figured that the developmental defect that affected her pregnancy in 1995 was just a fluke. That fetus, a girl, was found to have severe hydrocephalus (water on the brain) at 20-weeks gestation, and the Myerses were told that she stood no chance of surviving beyond birth. They decided to terminate the pregnancy.

But when, in 2000, Chapnik Myers became pregnant with twin girls, and at the 20-week sonogram, the doctor grimly asked what exactly had happened with her first pregnancy, she knew that something was very wrong. One of the fetuses had severe hydrocephalus, while the other appeared to be fine. Rather than carry both babies to term and risk the health of both Chapnik Myers and the healthy twin, the couple opted for selective termination of the sick fetus.

The insertion of a needle into the unhealthy twin came with an attendant 10-percent risk of infection. Unfortunately, Chapnik Myers developed a fever, and she lost the healthy baby, as well.

By now, it was clear to the Myerses and their doctor that this was not just a random genetic misfire, but rather something caused by a recessive genetic mutation that each of them was carrying. The head of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where the Myerses live, informed them that two of the daughters they had lost had been afflicted by an extremely rare genetic disease called Walker-Warburg Syndrome.

“It was a pretty big experience to be blindsided with,” said Chapnik Myers of the news.

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© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.