Are you a baby? Did your parents make the jerky decision not to vaccinate you? Well, then are you in for some fevery, itchy, rashtastic fun! Measles is back!


Thanks to modern medicine and mass immunization, by the year 2000, measles was considered all but eliminated from the US. But then along came Jenny McCarthy's tinfoil hat theories that vaccines caused autism, and dick parents who assumed that other kids' immunity would protect their kids and that vaccines were government mind control drugs made out of cancer proliferated.

And, as a result, 2011 clocked in the highest number of measles cases in the last 15 years. While 222 doesn't sound like a big number, consider what happened in France, another country that, for all its good qualities, contains a large number of assholes who chose to forego vaccination. According to LiveScience, France experienced from 30 to 40 cases of measles from 2005 to 2007, about 1,000 cases in 2009, and about 15,000 cases in 2011. Last year, 30,000 people in mainland Europe came down with the measles.


The whooping cough has enjoyed an upswing in popularity thanks to non-vaccination; in Fraser Valley, British Colombia, about 250 people have come down with The Whoops, and in Wausau, Wisconsin, about 100 people have recently gotten sick. Whooping cough, like measles, can be deadly to babies and people with weakened immune systems.

Don't be an asshole. Vaccinate your kids.

[Live Science]