California just declared whooping cough an epidemic, with 800 newly reported cases in the last two weeks alone. It gets worse: "The number of actual cases may be even higher, because past studies have shown that for every case of whooping cough that is reported, there are 10 more that are not officially counted," CNN reports.
Those sentences should only exist in musty newspapers from decades long past. They shouldn't need to be written in 2014. Whooping cough is a solved problem in medicine. But this is a case where the danger isn't the disease. It's us, and the anti-vaccine pseudoscience too many Americans have begun to believe in. Dylan Matthews explains:
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