Tag: disneyland
Disneyland To Close Some Attractions To Build ‘Star Wars’ Land

Disneyland To Close Some Attractions To Build ‘Star Wars’ Land

By Hugo Martin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — To make way for Star Wars, Disneyland is about to launch its largest expansion ever, which means shutting down a significant chunk of the Anaheim theme park.

In January, 10 attractions and eateries will close — some temporarily, some permanently — only a few months after the resort hiked the price of annual passes as much as 31 percent. This spring, Disneyland’s biggest rival, Universal Studios Hollywood, plans to unveil a widely anticipated Harry Potter attraction.

For any other operation, charging customers more and giving them less would be a perilous business strategy, especially if the competition is upping its game. Not so at Disneyland.

“At the end of the day, you won’t see any attendance drop,” said Dennis Speigel, a theme park consultant and president of International Theme Park Services in Cincinnati. “The tourists will come, hell or high water.”

Instead, the construction project to build a new Star Wars area is likely to demonstrate the devotion of hard-core Disney fans.

Daniel Bowmen of Los Angeles’ Sylmar section, who has owned a Disneyland premium pass for 24 years and visits at least twice a week, said he is disappointed that the park is closing so many attractions during construction. But that won’t keep him away.

“I just renewed my annual pass, so I’ll be going to Disneyland,” he said.

Disney officials won’t say whether the announced closures and the annual pass price hike have affected pass sales so far. During the quarter that ended Oct. 3 — before the closures and the price hikes were announced — Walt Disney Co. reported a 15 percent jump in attendance at all domestic parks.

Orange County, home of the Disneyland and Disney California Adventure theme parks, is expected to be the country’s fourth-most-popular destination for Christmas travel, according to a study of hotel reservations by the travel website Priceline.com.

Park executives don’t seem worried, noting that Disneyland has added several new features in recent months to appeal to devoted Star Wars fans. Disney acquired Lucasfilm, along with the Star Wars franchise, in 2012 for $4 billion.

In Tomorrowland, the Space Mountain and Star Tours rides have been overhauled to include special effects borrowed from the recently released movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

An underused area in the Innovations building of Tomorrowland has been converted into Star Wars Launch Bay, a hall where parkgoers can play Star Wars video games, buy merchandise and meet costumed characters from the movie franchise.

The Galactic Grill eatery now sells treats inspired by Star Wars characters, such as a dessert dubbed Darth by Chocolate and the Cheese 3PO Burger.

The additional Star Wars features, part of an overall celebration called Season of the Force, launched Nov. 15. No closing date has been announced.

Perhaps the only crowding problem facing Disneyland over the next few months, say theme park experts, is that park visitors will be swarming around Tomorrowland.

“It’s going to be crowded and they are all going to be in one corner of Tomorrowland,” said David Koenig, an author of several books about Disney. “The question is, how many bodies are you going to get in there?”

To build the new 14-acre Star Wars area, the park will permanently close Big Thunder Ranch in Frontierland, Big Thunder Ranch Barbecue, Big Thunder Ranch petting zoo and Big Thunder Ranch Jamboree, starting Jan. 10.

(Disneyland officials say the animals in the petting zoo have been adopted by a Southern California family that has worked with Disney animals in the past.)

Nearby attractions on the Rivers of America — mainly Fantasmic, the Mark Twain Riverboat, the Sailing Ship Columbia, the Pirates Lair on Tom Sawyer Island, the Disneyland Railroad and the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes — will close temporarily.

In total, 14 percent of the park’s attractions will be closed either permanently or temporarily in an area that represents nearly a quarter of Disneyland’s 85 acres.

Also, Autopia, the mini car attraction that opened in 1955, is set to close for routine maintenance in January. According to Koenig, the car ride will reopen with a new sponsor, Honda. Disney officials declined to comment.

To clear more space for the new Star Wars land, Disney employees who work in offices outside the park, just north of Big Thunder Ranch, have begun to move into two office buildings that Disney purchased last year a few blocks away on South Manchester Avenue.

A completion date has yet to be announced for the Star Wars land, but industry experts predict that an opening date could be at least a year away.

The last time that Disneyland closed several attractions for a major construction project was between 1995 and 1998, when the park overhauled Tomorrowland with several new attractions and a gold-and-brown paint scheme replacing the previous blue-and-white colors.

Disney has yet to reveal what will be included in the new Star Wars land. In announcing the park expansion in August, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger said it would include a re-creation of the Millennium Falcon, in which guests can take the controls for a “customized secret mission,” along with an immersive attraction that will put visitors into “a climactic battle between the First Order and the Resistance.”

Instead of discouraging visitors, Speigel said the construction for the Star Wars land could even pique interest among fans who hope to get a glimpse of the new attractions behind the construction walls.

He noted that attendance increased during an expansion of Fantasyland at the Magic Kingdom in Florida from 2011 to 2014.

“It became a great marketing tool,” Speigel said. “They capitalized on it.”

Meanwhile, Disney officials say they have plenty to offer visitors. The park’s 60th anniversary celebration — including a revamped fireworks show, a nightly parade and a water-and-fire extravaganza at Disney California Adventure — will continue until Sept. 5.

“We are excited to begin the work that will lay the foundation for the future Star Wars-themed land at Disneyland,” Disney spokeswoman Suzi Brown said. “With our continuing Diamond Celebration entertainment and the new Season of the Force offerings, there is so much for guests to do during this time.”

©2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Riders cheer after riding the updated Hyperspace Mountain at Disneyland during the media preview of Star Wars Season of The Force on Nov. 12, 2015 in Anaheim, Calif. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

 

California Governor Signs Tough New Vaccination Law

California Governor Signs Tough New Vaccination Law

By Phil Willon and Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation Tuesday, California barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization.

California’s weakened public health defenses against measles and other preventable diseases led to the adoption of the measure, signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown, intended to stem the rising number of parents opting not to inoculate their children.

Public health officials said a proliferation of waivers, many sought because of unfounded health concerns, helped fuel a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in December and quickly spread across the West, infecting 150 people.

“I think it’s a great day for California’s children. You’re living in a state that just got a little safer,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an advocate of immunization.

California joins Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states to ban vaccination waivers based on religion. All 50 states require immunization of children starting school, although about 20 allow exemptions based on personal beliefs.

Beginning with the 2016 school year, the new law could affect more than 80,000 California students.

Only medical exceptions will be allowed for those entering day care and kindergarten. Children with physician-certified allergies and immune-system deficiencies, for example, will be exempted.

Parents can still decline to vaccinate children who attend private home-based schools or public independent studies off campus.
“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”

Brown had supported a religious exemption as recently as 2012, and faced criticism because of it.

This year, hundreds of people opposed to vaccination descended on the Capitol to protest the new legislation. They argued that it would violate parents’ right to make decisions about their children’s health and interfere with their children’s right to a public education.

“I’m heartbroken,” said Rebecca Estepp of Poway, who belongs to the advocacy group California Coalition for Health Choice, which opposed the legislation. “It’s so coercive. It’s so punitive.”

Estepp, who said her 17-year-old son was injured by a vaccine, said opponents would be likely to challenge the law in court.
Dotty Hagmier, a mother of three from Orange County who also criticized the measure, said many families may choose home schools or move out of the state.

“These moms are strong,” she said. “And they’re not going to just give up. They’re not going to give up their rights.”

Health officials say declining immunization rates have led to a loss of “herd immunity” in some schools and communities, a situation in which high local vaccination rates against a contagious disease suppress it from spreading.

“When you get really close to immunizing everybody … the less you’ll see of those diseases,” said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, interim health officer for Los Angeles County.

Gunzenhauser said the Los Angeles public health department would work with schools to make sure children who register without being up to date on vaccinations become caught up as soon as possible.

Until recently, many preventable diseases, including whooping cough and mumps, were thought to be largely eradicated due to widespread inoculation. The United States declared measles to be eliminated from the country in 2000.

Fueled by persistent assertions that vaccines were linked to autism, a growing number of parents began declining immunizations for their children. Vaccination rates in California’s kindergarten classes steadily declined between 2001 and 2013, particularly in affluent and coastal areas of the state.

As immunization rates dipped, there were flare-ups of measles. A 2012 bill required parents who sought personal-belief exemptions to first be informed by a health care professional about the benefits and risks of vaccines. Brown signed that bill but carved out an exception for those who declined vaccines for religious reasons.

The Disneyland outbreak — the worst in California in 15 years — was a catalyst for further legislative action.

Public health officials warn that California remains at high risk of another outbreak because immunization levels in some communities remain so low. Dr. Gil Chavez, the state epidemiologist, said in April that immunization rates in some schools are at 50 percent or lower, creating an ideal environment for the virus to spread.

Last fall, 13,592 kindergarten students — 2.54 percent of California’s kindergarteners — had personal-belief exemptions on file. That is a sharp increase from 1998, when 4,032 kindergarteners, or 0.77 percent, had them.

The new vaccination law goes into effect a year from now. On July 1, 2016, newly enrolled children in day care and school will need to be immunized absent medical waivers.

Children who have a personal-belief exemption on file before Jan. 1, 2016 will have more time to comply with the law.

Such children who are in nursery school or preschool must comply to enroll in kindergarten; those in elementary school must do so by 7th grade. Those already in junior high and high school will remain exempt.

Leah Russin, a Palo Alto mother who worked with Vaccinate California, an advocacy group in favor of the legislation, said the new law helps assuage fears that many communicable diseases could afflict her 22-month-old son, Leo.

“There are a lot of things to worry about when you have a little kid,” Russin said, “but I no longer have to worry that he’s going to get measles at school.”
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(Times staff writers Rong-Gong Lin, Eryn Brown and Emily Foxhall contributed to this report.)

Photo: Not the most magical place on earth when children are sick. The measles outbreak at Disneyland earlier this year triggered California to enact one of the strictest laws for vaccination in the country. This is Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland. Tom Bricker via Flickr

California’s Measles Outbreak Is Over, But Vaccine Fight Continues

California’s Measles Outbreak Is Over, But Vaccine Fight Continues

By Rong-Gong Lin II and Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — California officials on Friday declared the end of the Disneyland measles outbreak, but the political battle over immunization that it sparked continues to rage on.

In announcing that the health scare had passed, state medical authorities warned that California remains at high risk of another outbreak because immunization levels in some communities remain so low.

The state epidemiologist, Dr. Gil Chavez, said immunization rates in some schools are at 50 percent or lower, creating an ideal environment for the virus to spread quickly. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics last month calculated that the measles virus in California spread in areas where vaccination rates were less than 86 percent.

But it remains unclear how much the Disneyland outbreak changed attitudes about immunization.

Legislation in Sacramento intended to induce more parents to get their children the measles vaccine and other shots stalled this week amid an outcry from anti-immunization forces who said the government should not tell parents what to do.

The debate on the bill has turned contentious. Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading anti-vaccine activist, used the word “holocaust” during a film screening to describe the purported damage done by vaccines to many recipients, a statement for which he later apologized.

Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who is pushing for greater vaccination, has been bombarded with personal attacks. One Internet posting imposed a Hitler mustache on Pan’s face; another said: “Can we hang Pan with a noose instead?”

While there has been a surge in vaccinations amid intense media focus on the issue, health officials say the immunization problems are so bad in some communities that a major outbreak could easily happen again.

The idea that the measles vaccine was linked to autism has been thoroughly discredited by scientists. Still, measles vaccination rates in California’s kindergarten classes have been declining over the last dozen years.

Among those whose vaccine status was known, about 7 out of every 10 California measles patients in this outbreak were unvaccinated. “If we had higher levels of immunity in the community, this outbreak would not have happened,” Chavez said.

The Disneyland outbreak sparked an aggressive response from health officials across California and beyond that experts say helped keep the disease from spreading even further.

Public health officials contacted thousands of Californians in 12 counties potentially exposed to measles, leading to warnings in airports, malls, schools, clinics and hospitals. In one hospital alone, a single person with measles exposed 14 pregnant women and 98 infants, including 44 in the neonatal intensive care unit.

One local agency estimated spending 1,700 hours on the measles investigation.

About 1 in 5 who got the measles in California had to be hospitalized. One collapsed at home, was placed on a mechanical ventilator due to severe pneumonia and developed multiple organ injury. Another suffered acute respiratory distress syndrome and had to be treated with an experimental drug that required special approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In all, 131 California residents were believed to have been infected with measles during the outbreak that began at Disneyland, as well as at least 26 people who resided in seven other states, Canada or Mexico, after visiting the Anaheim theme park or catching the virus from someone who went there.

Experts credited public health officials with recognizing the outbreak early and aggressively moving to identify the sick and isolate those exposed to the virus, giving out immunizations and other medicine to the exposed to keep the disease from spreading.

“It’s over, and it’s due to incredibly good public health,” said Dr. James Cherry, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor and primary editor of the Textbook of Pediatric Infectious Diseases.

The outbreak prompted two state lawmakers, Sens. Pan and Ben Allen, also a Democrat, to push for closing a loophole in state law that gives parents the right to refuse state-required vaccinations due to their personal beliefs while still sending their children to public and private schools.

Early on, the bill appeared to have momentum, winning approval of the Senate Health Committee after Gov. Jerry Brown signaled he was open to considering an elimination of all but medical waivers to vaccines.

But SB 277 stalled this week in the Senate Education Committee, where members demanded changes after hundreds of parents lined up to say they would pull their kids out of school if the bill passed. A vote is scheduled for Wednesday.

“There is a problem in denying a child a public education,” said Jean Munoz Keese, a spokeswoman for the California Coalition for Health Choice. Referring to the announcement that the measles outbreak had ended, she said, “It confirms what we have said all along: that we have no crisis.”

The bill faces a difficult future, said Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San Jose State University.

He said the opposition is a blend of libertarians suspicious of anything the government mandates, people who believe in “natural health” remedies and worry vaccines will harm their kids, religious people and parents who don’t have the means to home-school their children if they don’t get a waiver.

“That’s quite a combination,” Gerston said. “One or two of these interests might not be enough to stop the legislation, but these many different sources of opposition, Pan and his allies have their hands full.”

Pan and Allen say they believe they can salvage their legislation and are willing to consider allowing some kind of religious exemption, though Allen said he knows of no mainstream religion that is doctrinally against vaccines.

“There is still an absolute consensus amongst folks in the medical and scientific communities that we have let our vaccination rates drop too low and that any attempt to increase the vaccination rate is an important thing to do,” Allen said.

There are other ways to achieve higher vaccination rates. One idea is to make it harder to get a vaccine exemption, said Saad Omer, an associate professor at Emory University and expert in vaccine policy.

For instance, the state could require parents at the beginning of every school year to write a letter explaining why they don’t want to vaccinate their child, and require it to be notarized and the parents to be counseled by a physician on the risks of not vaccinating.

New York City’s public school system, for example, requires parents to submit a written explanation of religious principles that guide objections to immunizations. Under New York state law, the school system can reject a request for an exemption, and it tells parents that state law does not permit exemptions based on personal, moral, secular or philosophical beliefs.

A federal appeals court in January upheld the New York law as constitutional.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Vials of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are displayed on a counter at a Walgreens Pharmacy on January 26, 2015 in Mill Valley, California (AFP/Justin Sullivan)

Study Links Disneyland Measles Outbreak To Low Vaccination Rates

Study Links Disneyland Measles Outbreak To Low Vaccination Rates

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Although epidemiologists have not yet identified the person who brought measles to Disneyland, triggering an international outbreak, researchers now say that parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids are probably to blame.

Using some simple math, the researchers show that the vaccination rate among people who were exposed to the measles during the outbreak was no higher than 86 percent, and it might have been as low as 50 percent.

In order to establish herd immunity, between 96 percent and 99 percent of the population must be vaccinated, experts say.

“Even the highest estimated vaccination rates from our model fall well below this threshold,” the researchers reported Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The team, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children’s Hospital, calculated the range of likely vaccination rates based on a few key data points. Based on historical data, infectious disease experts know that in the absence of any vaccination, a single person infected with measles can spread it to between 11 and 18 other people. They also know that it takes ten to 14 days for one measles case to lead to another.

The last variable in their equation is the number of people in a semi-vaccinated community who actually become infected after exposure to a single person with measles. Since this figure — called the effective reproductive number — isn’t precisely known, the researchers considered scenarios where it was as low as 3.2 and as high as 5.8.

In the best-case scenario, the vaccination rate among people who encountered the measles as a result of the Disneyland outbreak was between 75 percent and 86 percent, the researchers calculated. If the true effective reproductive number was in the middle of the range, the vaccination rate would have been between 66 percent and 81 percent. If the effective reproductive number was high, the vaccination rate had to have been between 50 percent and 71 percent, according to the study.

In other words, the only way to explain how the measles spread from a single person at Disneyland to 142 people in seven states is that a substantial number of American parents have not had their children fully immunized with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

“Clearly, MMR vaccination rates in many of the communities that have been affected by this outbreak fall well below the necessary threshold to sustain herd immunity, thus placing the greater population at risk as well,” the researchers concluded.

Public health officials do keep track of vaccination rates. In California, for instance, the state Department of Public Health reported that 92.6 percent of kindergarten students had received at least two doses of the MMR vaccine in the 2014-15 school year.

So why did the study authors go to all this trouble? In an outbreak involving a major tourist destination like Disneyland, there is no single state, county or school district that can report the overall vaccination rate, the researchers wrote. As a result, mathematical modeling like this may give a clearer picture than any individual government agency.

The scope of the multistate outbreak is certainly a reflection of the anti-vaccination movement, which continues to grow despite overwhelming medical evidence that the vaccines do not cause autism or other developmental problems. In most cases, side effects are limited to pain at the injection site, fever, a mild rash or temporary swelling, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rare cases, children may have a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine or develop febrile seizures, joint pain, temporary arthritis or a blood disorder called immune thrombocytopenic purpura.

The outbreak “shines a glaring spotlight on our nation’s growing anti-vaccination movement and the prevalence of vaccination-hesitant parents,” the authors wrote.

In California, three state legislators have introduced a bill that would make it more difficult for parents to opt out of vaccinations by claiming a personal belief exemption. The bill, SB 277, would require children to be vaccinated against measles and other infectious diseases before enrolling in California schools.

One of the sponsors of the bill is Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who represents Sacramento.

Photo: Melissa Johnson via Flickr