This week, finally, reality began to dawn.

Not quackery, urban myth and belief, but physiology and contagion and sickness.

Now to the latest on the measles outbreak.

The government says 102 people are infected across 14 states now. And the American Academy of Pediatrics

is urging families to vaccinate their children against the disease. Measles outbreak, the biggest

in years and traced back to Disneyland. The measles outbreak spreads to a fifth Bay Area County.

One local pediatrician accuses vaccination opponents of undermining a basic

survival concept. Yes, they did, which is why this outbreak was literally inevitable. The measles

mumps rubella vaccine had essentially eradicated those childhood diseases in the United States.

But when parents began to stop vaccinating their kids, they were creating

not just potential patients, but vectors spreading the disease to the vulnerable, such as the

baby's pre-vaccination age infected this week in a Chicago daycare center.

And whose fault is all of this?

Well, mainly, it's the media's fault. The nightmare began

in 1998 when a British conman named Dr. Andrew Wakefield faked results and published an article

in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, fraudulently claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

It was a lie, which the journal should have figured out long before finally retracting the

article 12 years later. By then, the bogus linkage had already spawned a movement of heartbroken

parents struggling to understand what or who was to blame for their children's afflictions.

Trading as it was on the counterfeit currency of pseudoscience,

that movement first languished as a relatively obscure Internet subculture,

until it was given vast exposure and lethal credibility by the media.

...