A face-to-face educational method used among Orthodox Jews apparently led to a U.S. outbreak of mumps in 2009 and 2010 even though most of those infected had been properly vaccinated, according to a U.S. study.
The outbreak, detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates how close, repeated contact with an infected person can overwhelm the mumps vaccine, the researchers said.
“The risk of infection with mumps may be higher when the exposure dose of virus is large or intensely transmitted,” wrote lead author Albert Barskey, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Immunization and Respirators Diseases, and colleagues.
This may also explain why the mumps vaccine tends to be less effective among household contacts than among school or community contacts, they added.
In the mumps outbreak, 3,502 cases were reported over a one-year period beginning in June 2009 in New Jersey, New York City and New York State’s Orange and Rockland counties. A camp in the Catskill Mountains was the source.
Many attended a religious school known as a yeshiva, where boys receive intense training with a study partner known as a chavrusa, who sits across a narrow table. The teaching method often involves animated discussions and the partners are switched several times a day.
The researchers wrote that “chavrusa study, with its prolonged, face-to-face contact,” probably resulted in high exposures to the virus, and these “overcame vaccine-induced protection in individual students.”
The large families in Orthodox Jewish communities also contributed to the spread, Barskey told Reuters Health in a telephone interview.
“As the outbreak went on, we started to see younger and older cases, and females as well. What that suggests is there was spread in the households. From family it would jump to a new school,” he said.
“The chavrusas played the biggest role. The households played a lesser role.”
The source of the outbreak was eventually traced to an 11-year-old boy, who had himself received two vaccine doses but nonetheless picked up the disease in the United Kingdom, where fears about vaccination had led to a large mumps outbreak.
That child attended the camp, which had about 400 Orthodox Jewish boys.
(Reuters)
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10 Responses
So homeschooling and distance education are a way to avoid disease? The disease is limited to boys?
I suspect that the percentage of Orthodox Jews who don’t get the vacine is much higher, and that if the study relied on self-reporting they may have been misled. Since they are used to secular Jews, who are much more likely to trust secular doctors and researchers, they simply asked “have you been vacinated” rather than checking actual medical records.
If indeed many people who were vacinated are coming down with the disease, we should expect to start hearing about malpractice lawsuits.
This seems to be another attempt at slandering Orthodox Judaism. It is rather far-fetched – what are they suggesting??? Perhaps they should be pushing for compulsory mumps vaccines in the United Kingdom, or additional vaccines for those going/returning from there, instead of slandering our millennial old learning systems.
YES, BUBBY! (no. 2), you are so right. Our alienated Jewish brethren, people like Mr. Barskey of the CDC, seem to have a particular focus on Orthodox Jews.
Under the leadership of Thomas Frieden, formerly head of the Dept. of Health of NYC, and the one who started the whole campaign against traditional Bris Milah, the CDC seems to have become a hotbed of resentment against Orthodox Jews.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Chavrusa learning is the norm among those 16+ not younger children who sit at desks listening to rebbeim and teachers most of the day. When chavrusas are learning together they are not necessarily sitting face to face, but just as often sitting in adjoining positions. I suspect these “scientists” engaged in some make believe hypothesis based on ethnic stereotypes.
#4 – more likely they asked the parents if the child had been vacinated, and many said they had when they hadn’t – the scientist assumes all Jews are equally reliable when asked that questions, and therefore starting looking for a reason why so many vacinated children got mumps (if face to face contact were a factor for vacinated children, it should show up primarily among the mainstream population of adolescents who routinely engage in kissing each other).
Something similar happened 30 years ago when it turns out that Haitians with AIDS, when asked about “inappropriate” sexual behavior or drug abuse would deny it (having much more pride than Americans), leading scientists to assume that being a Haitian was a factor in getting AIDS (since they assumed the individuals had no other other risk factors).
First it’s metzitza be-peh, now it’s chavrusas??!!!
Can they tell us the causes of HIV-AIDS, and whether any restrictions should be put on certain types of “marriage” to prevent HIV-AIDS, or is only the behavior of frum Jews that’s the problem?!!
This seems like a reasonable study. They are not demonizing chavrusa study. They are pointing out that the same close contact which helps learning also can help spread disease. The outbreak was caused by people not vaccinating in the UK. Also, the frum community should work harder to improve our vaccination rates. We can do better than 89%.
There is a whistleblower suit going on right now that Merck has been misleading the public now for decades as to the effectiveness of their MMR vaccine.
The following is a quote from Forbes a few months ago:
“Anyone who falls on either side of the debate about vaccines’ alleged potential to cause harm is sure to have heard the big news this week — the unsealing of a whistleblower suit against Merck, filed back in 2010 by two former employees accusing the drug maker of overstating the effectiveness of its mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine.
The scientists claim Merck defrauded the U.S. government by causing it to purchase an estimated four million doses of mislabeled and misbranded MMR vaccine per year for at least a decade, and helped ignite two recent mumps outbreaks that the allegedly ineffective vaccine was intended to prevent in the first place.
“As the single largest purchaser of childhood vaccines (accounting for more than 50 percent of all vaccine purchasers), the United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck’s fraud. But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection against mumps. And while this is a disease the CDC targeted to eradicate by now, the failure in Merck’s vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur,” the suit alleges.”
Pardon me for de-lurking for just a moment.
I had the honor of hosting one of the CDC researchers who worked on this study for Shabat — a frum Jew from Atlanta. He heaped effusive praise on the Chasidim and their leaders for their complete and total cooperation in trying to find out what was causing this disease outbreak. The last thing any of the parties involved would want to do would be to defame Orthodox Judaism! Because the mumps vaccine is not 100% effective (and even getting an actual case of the mumps does not always prevent you from getting it a second time) the information in this report will allow communities such as this to take greater precautions in the future. We can handle changing from face to face learning for a few weeks while the outbreak dies down.
While mumps is not fatal, it can lead to lifelong health problems such as sterility. It is not something to take lightly. Vaccination is not 100% effective, but it does dramatically reduce the risk of infection — and does not cause autism.
Back to lurking.
You call yourself a frum news page?
IT’S ALL FROM HASHEM
Shame on you for this article!
Unless you want to promote achdut, leave these type of articles in the trash bin.
We shouldn’t need to have Hurricane Sandy to whip us into shape.