The Australian anti-vaccination movement has decided to strike below the belt. Below the belt down to kid level, actually. Stephanie Messenger has written a kids’ book called “Measles are Marvellous.” (sic- I think that’s how they spell it Down Under)

According to the description:

This book takes children aged 4 – 10 years on a journey of discovering about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations, while teaching them to embrace childhood disease, heal if they get a disease, and build their immune systems naturally.

I can’t make this stuff up. Now, I have a *very* small amount of sympathy for the anti-vaccination crowd. At the end of the day, most of them are doing what they think they need to to protect their children. Messenger herself has a sad tale to tell – she lost a child and believes it was the vaccinations that caused it.

But telling kids that measles are wonderful? Really? Not only could this campaign of misinformation cause even more children to get sick or die, it could cause children to have a completely skewed perspective on how severe measles really can be. If you really want to see what measles looks like, check out the CDC’s image library. Note: Does not contain even one butterfly.

This isn’t Messenger’s first foray into the anti-vax world.

In 1998, she co-authored a book with our old friend Meryl Dorey, of AVN fame, called Vaccination Roulette: Experiences, risks and alternatives.

This year, she’s been giving “vaccination seminars” in Australia. From the overview of her talk:

In QLD approx. 39 babies die from SIDS each year – that’s 1 every 9 days!

Find out what you can do to protect your baby that has a 100% success rate!

This information is being hidden from the general public by vested interests.

Forgetting about the fact that there’s no link between immunizations and SIDS, measles isn’t exactly a walk in the creepy CGI-butterfly-filled park.

According to the Department of Health in Victoria, Australia:

Measles is a serious and highly contagious viral disease which causes fever, runny nose, cough and sore red eyes, followed by a rash. Measles can sometimes lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia. About one person in 2,000 who contracts measles will develop inflammation of the brain. For every 10 people who become affected in this way, one will die and four will have permanent brain damage. Measles still causes deaths in Australia. A rare condition called SSPE can develop several years after a measles infection. SSPE rapidly destroys the brain and is always fatal.

And just this week, the Department of Health issued a Health Alert regarding measles.

In the past four weeks the Department of Health (DH) has been notified of four confirmed cases of measles in metropolitan Melbourne.

I checked back and there have been similar alerts that went out in April, 2011, January, 2011, August, 2010 and February, 2010.

Once again, the antivaxxers are ignoring the facts. For more commentary on this, check out PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson and Reasonable Hank.