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Mod notice: It is important to keep in mind that we are all strangers on the internet here, and it is therefore important to exercise critical thinking when it comes to medical advice and related questions.
Anything you read here has the potential to be completely made up and/or wrong, including this mod notice.
including this mod notice.
Yeah, take that, mod notice!
Srsly tho good reminder to all.
including this mod notice
Ahem you're wrong 🤓
Well, I made it up, I didn't copy it from somewhere. In other words, I'm contributing OC, here...
I think official government advice at this point is to find an infected person and snort their sore spots.
I would go with a vaccine, otherwise I suppose isolate from society.
Healthcare professional here - but not your HPC and you cannot confirm that I am who I am so double check what I write:
Get your titers checked and get revaccinationes asap. If you are not vaccinated or are a non-responder talk to your healthcare provider. Isolate until then.
Mask up and keep your hands away from mouth, eyes and nose. You will need a properly fitting FFP3/NP95 mask here - measles are far meaner in terms of infectiousness than COVID. Tight fitting means: You have no leaks at the side - if your glasses fog up, if you can feel air going in or out next to your face,etc. it is not working. The usual "duckbill" masks with straps around the ears very very rarely fit properly.
Wash your hands and desinfect them properly.
Stay the fuck away from babies. Really. Please.
Any reason to not skip the titer test and just get an MMR booster (especially if you’re born in the 60s)?
Every vaccination has a (although very slim) chance to cause an adverse reaction. Around 5% of all people vaccinated have a minor skin reaction (which is physiological and not an anaphylaxis. 1% report joint pain.
But,more severely, 1-4 people out of a million develop a life-threatening anaphylaxis, 3 out 100.000 a serious blood clothing disorder. Very rarely(as in: Less than 1 in 1 Million), but with a slightly higher incidence of you are an adult pancreatitis and deafness is reported.
As medicine is always a game of chances we try not to risk things,even if they are rare.
One I can think of... I want to my local pharmacy last week to get an MMR shot, and was refused. They pretty much wont do it without a Dr's order.
Regarding masks: if you have a beard: shave. Unless your beard is n95/ffp2 rated
Mostly yes,but it is possible to have some beardstyles if you know very much what you are doing (and have a large head).
But the actual area of contact and to a certain degrees the areas around it need to be shaved properly,yes.
You can always glob it full of petroleum jelly (I did quantitative fit testing for a time, it really works) but it's gross.
Hmm....
Measles is the most infectious virus we know of. Contagion is measured by how many people the average patient will infect. Covid was a 4, measles is 18.
Anti vaxxers really fucking shit up
Oh god...
Well that's terrifying.
Just to add to the terror, measles can strip away previously held immunities. Had chicken pox as a child? If you get (and survive) measles you might get chicken pox again!
Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia
Get vaccinated, folks!
Both shots leave you at 98% immunity. Then if you somehow beat those odds and still manage to get it, it will be much less severe.
You'll be totally fine. The only victims of measles in the US will mostly be. children of idiot parents, adults who had idiot parents and then became idiot adults, and people with actual medical issues that have prevented them from safely getting the vaccine.
And babies who are too young to have gotten the vaccine yet. 😞
The obvious choice here is to get vaccinated if you're not.
My healthcare provider had me tested for Measles antibodies because apparently that shit can wear off after 50 years in some people. I was still good with Mumps and Rubella, but was wide open to Measles. So I got an MMR vaccine (available at Walgreens, CVS, etc) and I’m good to go. So if you’re over 50, you might want to get tested or simply just ask your your doctor for their opinion about getting another shot.
adults born between 1963, when the first measles vaccine was approved, and 1968. During that period, some children received an inactivated (killed) measles vaccine that was less effective than the live vaccine.
People born before 1957 are considered to have “presumptive evidence” of immunity, because nearly everyone born during this period got the disease during childhood. But health-care workers born before 1957 who don’t have proof of immunity should consider getting the vaccine.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/should-you-get-a-measles-vaccine-booster
Get your titers checked by your doctor, that’s about the only other thing you can do. Especially if you were born before 1989, since you may have only had 1 measles vaccine instead of 2, which raises the effectiveness.
Thanks, I got blood tested a couple of months ago and found I still have immunity. Which is a nice thing to find out going into this.
If your titers are good and you’re masking then I don’t know of anything else to be done about it, since measles is airborne (even more so than COVID). Unless you’re immunocompromised those two things should protect you.
Measles is something like 4 to 5 times more infectious than covid. So yeah, there really isn't much more to do
Whoa, I didn't know the stat was that much higher. Dang...
86' baby, can confirm.
⚠️Except double-checking my childhood record's, I did have my full 2-shot-series. 😱
I got my third booster The First Go-Round.
Upon getting my titer results, I asked what the deal was. Seems my timeframe didn't get "The good stuff"?
Can you clarify what you’re saying? Do you mean that your immune levels are low as an adult despite getting the MMR vaccine three times instead of two as a child?
It can happen! When a vaccine is 97% effective, that means for 3% of people who get it as directed, they still won’t have full immunity. A lot of the time it can be fixed with extra shots, since for some people (or even just with some vaccines) their bodies need a little extra ‘training’ before it works.
To corroborate with personal experience, I got a third round in 2019 for grad school, but post-vaccine blood test showed only a moderate increase in resistance to measles.
Doc said immunity to measles in particular can be resistant to training for many individuals and recommended postponing another booster unless traveling to a country where measles was a problem. Guessing he didn’t imagine that country might be the USA.
Since I live in a city with a lot of tourism from states with burgeoning measles epidemics, I’m getting my fourth booster in April. Oy vey.
Haha titers
If you got 2 doses of the MMR vaccine as a child, you're probably fine. The vaccine is like 97% effective at preventing measles, and if you're part of that 3% your symptoms will probably be milder that if you weren't vaccinated. It's a damn good vaccine. Even if you got only 1 dose that's still considered to be 90-something percent effective.
Talk to your doctor, people with certain autoimmune conditions, the elderly, people born when they were only giving 1 dose of the vaccine or who received older vaccine formulas may need a booster. The rest of us who are vaccinated are almost certain to be fine.
The real risk is to children who haven't been vaccinated yet because they're too young, people who can't receive the vaccine for health reasons like allergies or other unvaccinated adults, and people with compromised immune systems.
I can't really find good numbers of what percent of the US overall is vaccinated, but if the current rates of children being vaccinated are anything to go by, it's most of them. Even with all of the anti vax talk, it seems like somewhere north of 80% of children in the US are still getting their recommended vaccines from what I can find. This is mostly going to hit that 10-20-ish percent who aren't vaccinated.
And the real tragedy that a good amount of the anti vax parents were actually vaccinated themselves as children and so get to enjoy that 97% immunity. They won't be in much danger of catching measles but their children will be.
Otherwise, all of the usual advice applies, wash your hands, disinfect shared surfaces and equipment, cover your mouth when you cough, maybe wear a mask in public, do what you can to encourage your friends and family to get vaccinated if they aren't.
Being vaccinated and have this vaccination working is already a 97%+ protection. Add a mask, and it's even better. Maybe avoid hugging infected people...
check to see if there's a mask bloc near you as they offer free respirators to anyone who needs them and they organize political actions to encourage mask wearing in all public spaces. https://maskbloc.org/. I also highly recommend r/Masks4All, their wiki is packed with so many tips on how to save money when buying masks in bulk. if you're comfortable with wearing an elastomeric respirator, your wallet is gonna thank you immensely as the price per lifetime use is laughably cheaper compared to buying disposable respirators multiple times per year. one model that I like is Honeywell 7700 with P100 filters.
one of the most effective individual actions you can take is fit-testing your respirator to make sure it's not leaking. stick to N95 respirators and higher and do a qualitative fit test at home. some mask blocs buy Portacount machines communally so they can offer free fit testing to the people who contact them. if that's not available locally, contact workplace safety companies to book a quantitative fit test with specialized equipment that you probably couldn't afford to buy for yourself. some of them also rent out Portacount machines although more rarely.
get educated on the swiss cheese model and stack up prevention methods instead of relying on a standalone one-size-fits-all solution.
you might wanna carry around an air purifier or build your own DIY model that's cheaper and more effective than most options on the market. you can also run it on a portable battery since the fans only consume 10W at max load. check out the r/crboxes subreddit if you need to ask questions, they're full of helpful people.
get connected with your local disability community as they have been battling eugenics for decades and developing novel ways of surviving pandemics since forever. ask your local immunocompromised neighbors what measures they're taking to stay alive. even if you're able-bodied, their safety measures will undoubtedly benefit you as well.
I'm leaving this option for last because it's not affordable for most people, but you might wanna look into Far-UVC lighting to disinfect the air. https://cybernightmarket.com/products/mini-far-uvc-lights-set
What are your recommendations for people with small faces? Because I've never encountered an N95 that felt like it fit.
I don't wear small size so keep that in mind when reading.
look through ppeo.com or on savewo.com. some models have size charts in the description but I wouldn't rely on them too much. the only way to know is to try every size and check which one fits you best. there are stores selling mask samples so you could use that. r/masks4all probably has a link.
If you are vaccinated properly (2 doses last I checked) you will be fine. Isolate is really your only other option. It's that contagious. Thankfully, as you're old enough to ask here if you do come down with the full illness it'll suck but you'll survive unless you have a compromised immune system.
Get vaccinated if you haven't and check if you need a booster if you have.
Isolation or minimal contact is not only another option, it always has been the first option to consider. It's difficult to do in our society, so we have other things like masking and distancing, but a virus can't spread to/from you if you're not around other persons.
Remember COVID? Do that
Banging pots and pans?
Of course not. They obviously meant baking a sourdough and watching Tiger King.
Howling at the moon and buying a bike
