SPOKANE, Wash — A photo of a woman is circulating faster than any outbreak.
Her name is Doctor Sherri Tenpenny. The picture includes a quote with different claims regarding measles and the chicken pox.
Tenpenny claims they are infections and not diseases, and that infections do not need vaccinations.
One KREM 2 viewer asked us to verify if these potentially dangerous claims are true.
We did this with the following sources: Doctor Bob Lutz with the Spokane Regional Health Department and the CDC.
The post quotes Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who appears in multiple articles and videos speaking publicly against vaccines.
She is Board Certified, and practices emergency medicine and osteopathic manipulative medicine.
But, Dr. Bob Lutz who practices family medicine, said her credentials don't directly deal with vaccines, measles or chicken pox.
"I would argue that emergency medicine physicians don't often times see a lot of vaccine preventable types of things or vaccine related issues," Dr. Litz said.
Doctor Tenpenny is quoted claiming measles and chicken pox are not diseases, they're infections. But we can confirm that's false.
The CDC refers to both as diseases. And Doctor Bob Lutz agrees.
"Infections are diseases," Dr. Lutz said.
The quote goes on to say they're infections, which come and go in a week or ten days, leaving behind a lifetime of immunity.
Dr.Lutz said some infections do come and go, but some don't. He adds that leaving behind a life time of immunity isn't 100 percent accurate.
"You get pneumonia multiple times, that does not mean that you have life long immunity to pneumonia," Dr. Lutz said.
Dr. Lutz, who again,works will these illnesses regularly, said the claim that infections come and go and can't be cured is false.
"I use infectious disease as an example, it can come and go and I can cure it," Dr. Lutz said.
Overall, he said Dr. Tenpenny, who is against vaccines, is playing with semantics in these claims.
"A little bit of truth there, but there's a lot of mistruths and a lot of kind of parsing the language," Dr. Lutz said.