Breaking news from Minnesota
Situation Update (3/29/11) There have been 13 confirmed cases of measles reported in Minnesota. Cases have ranged in age from 4 months to 34 years old. Five of the cases were too young to receive vaccine, six were of age but were not vaccinated, and two have unknown vaccine status. There have been eight hospitalizations and no deaths.
I wrote this as a comment at Respectful Insolence, but I think it deserves a post of its own:
I've been thinking about Dr. Jay's various comments:
Dr. Jay at #67, 3/25 Friday afternoon
The hospitalization details are unavailable. I think that most of them are probably quite "soft" because most doctors are just confounded by this "new" disease
Jay's comment made me irate, but I wasn't sure why.
Later on in the discussion, Dr. Jay reveals that over the weekend, he has time to play two games of soccer, take his dog to the beach, and watch sports on TV.
I began to understand my ire.
In other words, Dr. Jay has leisure--he does not have to work another (or a third) job to make ends meet. He isn't caring for a second or a third or a fourth child, or older family members. He's not counting the money he has, and from that drawing up the weekly shopping list. He's not concerned with the worry of doing the week's laundry outside of the home (you know, are there enough coins for the washer and dryer, what will he do to keep the kids out of trouble while spending a couple of hours at the laundromat, making sure the family's laundry isn't just processed but not stolen)...
The freedom Dr. Jay has to spend his time over the weekend suggests his assumptions about what people do on a weekend. In other words, like many =>middle-class folk, Dr. Jay cannot imagine the reality--the daily tasks and worries that people with far fewer economic resources that he commands--must manage.
To get back to the subject of the hospitalized children:What we do know is that all of the hospitalized were children and we can infer that some were infants.
Another thing we can infer is that many of the 11 confirmed cases of measles in Hennepin county are Somali..
And what do we know about the socio-economic status of the Minnesota Somali? Here's Omar Hassan, owner of Robland Home Healthcare.
"The Somali community, we are new immigrants, most of them are low-income, their education is very poor,...
It's not that poor folk --even under-educated immigrants-- don't have the will or the desire or even the knowledge to care for their children ill with vaccine-preventable disease. It's that they do not have the resources, and their children may have better care in hospital.
And that is why high vaccine uptake is not just a public health issue, but a social justice issue.
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