Flight attendendant dies from measles complications

Oh, gosh. Remember earlier this year when I found out through a friend that the MMR vaccine I was positive that my incredibly responsible parents would've had me get as a youngster might not, in fact, be giving me any protection at all from our local measles outbreak?

 This is tragic. Rotem Amitai was most likely in a similar situation - she had been vaccinated as a child and probably, like me, just didn't know there was any reason to worry. She contracted the measles in late March, shortly before the time I got myself tested and re-vaccinated.

I'm so grateful to my friend Laura for cluing me in. Having my titers done proved that I was indeed among the large set of people who were given vaccinated in the late 60's/early 70's and yet did not, after all, have lifetime immunity due to the recommended dosages at the time being insufficient. With my asthma and allergies having a tendency to complicate even the stupidest of colds, I'm pretty sure a round of measles could have gone very badly. Hopefully not to this extent but I'm still having a little "That could so easily have been me" moment here.

And I'm just so sad for this lovely woman who should have had so much of her life ahead of her.

Measles immunity update

Elizabeth at Boomer Highway suggested that I share the graph I'd linked to in my last post - seems like a good idea, here you are! 


Here's an update to my late April "Frogma PSA: Measles News for the Midlife Set, in which I talked about finding out that my assumption (based on having incredibly responsible parents who would've given me all the childhood shots recommended at the time) that I was immune to the measles that are on the loose in Brooklyn might not be right. It felt a little bit like thinking I'd been walking around with pants on the whole time and then having a trusted friend say "Guess what..." - that kind of a bad surprise!

I wrote about it but didn't get right on with taking care of myself the way I should have. The beginning of each month gets busy with books to be closed at work and after that it had just kind of gone to the back burner, but Elizabeth A. Havey, a friend from my midlife women's blogging group recently did a post about it on her Boomer Highway. As you might guess from the name, she's a bit older than me (I'm Generation X) and her post was about her actual experience with the childhood diseases against which the MMR vaccine defends. Her measles experience in particular was so bad that her mother told her later that she "spent every moment watching over me, praying she wouldn’t lose me". So much for this business about measles not being a big deal, right? 

Anyways, that was just the reminder I needed. I live about a mile from one of our Brooklyn measles outbreak hot spots and with new cases still being reported (there were 423 confirmed in NYC at the beginning of May, and a hundred more by May 20th), and my ordinarily mild asthma always waiting in the wings to complicate even the stupidest of common colds, this was really not something I wanted to keep gambling with.

Earlier this week, I checked in with my doctor about my concerns. She got right back to me saying "Get tested, and if you don't have immunity, get vaccinated". I went to one of those CityMD walk-in clinics (wouldn't want to trade in my doctors for those but boy are they convenient for these simple sorts of things) during my lunch hour on Tuesday for the blood draw. They promised results within 3 to 5 days. The very next afternoon, they sent me a "we would like to talk to you" email. Good followup, there's a patient portal where I could get the results but this was a 24 hour turnaround and I wouldn't have been looking for a couple more days.

Sure enough, it turns out that I've got no immunity to ANY of those MMR guys. Yikes!

I got vaccinated today - doing my bit both for myself and for the neighborhood.

SO glad I found out about this!

Frogma PSA - Measles News For The Midlife Set

Well, WOW. They say you learn something new every day. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm enough of a creature of habit that most days I would have to think really hard to come up with the day's lesson, but not yesterday. Yesterday's lesson?

I probably need a measles booster.

This was pretty mind-blowing for me. I am fortunate enough to have been born to some of the most responsible parents a person could ask for, and all the medical, dental, and schooling stuff was taken care of, no exceptions. I live in Brooklyn, which is one of the hot spots in this growing measles outbreak we've got going on right now, but I didn't really think twice about it as far as being affected personally, because I'm about as sure as a person can be that I got those immunizations when I was little.

Until an old friend who lives near me mentioned that she'd just gotten a measles booster, at which point I thought "Hm, maybe I should check with my folks, just to be sure".

And asking my incredibly responsible folks to confirm that I'd been vaccinated against a childhood illness here in my early 50's felt so bizarre that I mentioned it on Facebook.

And then a couple of very smart friends whose opinions I respect filled me in on some facts I didn't know - basically, it turns out that many of us born in the 60's were vaccinated (here's an amazing chart showing the falloff of the disease after the introduction of the vaccine), but it was still early enough in the development of the vaccines that they did not have the lifelong effectiveness of later versions. That was possibly the most useful FB exchange I've been a part of in a while - thanks to our local anti-vaxxers, Brooklynites in particular can't rely on herd immunity at this point, and I had NO idea that I might not be safe. I've got things I want to do this summer and I do NOT have time for a bout of middle-aged measles!

This is definitely not my usual topic, but it was a startling enough revelation that I thought I would share it anyways, particularly since the FB exchange ended with the sharing of a really good NPR piece covering the exact topic. 

Click here to read.