With the United States, facing its largest individual measles outbreak in 25 years, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will lead Federal Health Agencies to explore possible possible treatments for the disease, including vitamins, the chord of an HHS spokesman. The decision is the last of a series of actions of the main health official of the Nation that experts fear that public confidence in vaccines is not confused as an essential public health tool.
The announcement occurs when Mr. Kennedy faces an intense violent reaction for his outbreak. It has swept large areas of the southwest, where vaccination rates are low, infecting hundreds and killing two girls. On Friday, the centers for disease control and prevention reported more than 930 cases throughout the country, most of which are associated with the southwest outbreak.
Critics have said that Mr. Kennedy has focused too much on unseeding treatments, such as cod liver oil supplements, and only offered support off for the measles vaccine, which according to studies is 97 percent effective to prevent infection.
The decision to put more resources in potential treatments, instead of urging vaccination, could be serious consistent in the center of the outbreak.
“We do not want to send the signal that you do not have to get vaccinated because there is only one way to get rid of it,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Brown University School of Public Health.
Scientists have already studied several vitamins and medications as potential treatments for Measles, said Michael Ostolm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.
Reulch decades have not generated miraculous treatment for measles virus, which can cause pneumonia, which makes it difficult for patients to reach oxygen in their lungs and brain swelling, which can cause blindness, deafness and intellectual disability.
“That leg is not a lack of studies,” he said.
Measles patients are generally offered “support care” to help more comfortable issues, while the virus follows its course, such as Tylenol to reduce their fever, supplementary oxygen and IV liquids.
The decision to find new treatments is aimed at helping people who choose not to vaccinate, said HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon. He added that CDC still recommend measles, papers and rubella as the most effective way to prevent measles.
But, he said, “our commitment is to support all families, regardless of their vaccination status, to reduce the risk of hospitalization, serious complications and death due to measles.”
As an example of such a community, Mr. Kennedy pointed to the Mennonites in western Texas, who experienced the worst part of the cases and hospitalizations in the current outbreak.
Mr. Nixon said that CDCs will collaborate with universities to test new treatments for a “large number of diseases”, which may include a combination of existing medications and vitamins. CBS News first reported the news of this effort.
Public health experts were baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to seek new treatments, instead of supporting shots that have decades of safety and efficiency data. They said this seemed to contradict their old approach to disease prevention instead of treatment.
“This is similar to saying:” Continue and eat whatever you want, do not exercise, smoke as a fireplace: we will invest all our resources in heart transplants, “said Dr. Jonathan Temte, former president of the CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee.
On the course of the current measles outbreak, Mr. Kennedy has sacrificed an inconsistent message, and sometimes contradictory, on the shot of MMR. At some points, the vaccine has described as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
Other times, his safety has been questioned: “We do not know the risks of many of these products because they do not feel to the test,” he said in an interview with CBS News last month.
Doctors in western Texas have said that Mr. Kennedy’s approach in treatments, instead of vaccines, has already hindered his work.
At the beginning of the outbreak, he said in Fox News that Hey had heard of “almost miraculous and snapshot recovery” with treatments such as cod liver oil, which said it was “the safest application of vitamin A.”
While doctors sometimes manage high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to handle severe measles, experts do not make rooms without doctor’s supervision.
Shortly after, doctors said they had found measles patients who had delayed critical medical treatment in favor of staying at home and being treated with some of the supplements that Mr. Kennedy promised. They said that some children with measles received toxic levels from vitamin A.
Dr. Ostholm said that Mr. Kennedy’s plan also assumed that people’s beliefs about vaccines were fixed, when in reality, clear information about their purpose and safety had encouraged thousands of vaccines in past sprouts.
Despite Mr. Kennedy’s claims that the Mennonites have “religious objections” to the shots because they contain “debris of the fetus”, the historians that the community say that it does not have a religious doctrine that prohibits vaccination, and vaccine experts say there are no fetal there.
Local doctors have pointed out about the safety of the opportunity, which Mr. Kennedy has helped perpetuate, as the main reason why his patients with Mennonita opt for their children of vaccination.
