U.S. officials say measles cases hit 25-year record high
At least 704 people in the United States have been sickened this year by measles, a highly contagious and potentially life-threatening disease, according to a report released Monday morning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s the greatest number of cases in a single year in 25 years and represents a huge setback for public health after measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. More than 500 of the people infected in 22 states were not vaccinated. Sixty-six people have been hospitalized, including 24 who had pneumonia. More than one-third of the cases are children younger than 5.
The biggest and longest-lasting outbreaks are in New York’s Rockland County and Brooklyn, centered in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, where misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has spread, officials said.
Thirteen outbreaks have been reported in 2019, accounting for 663 cases, or 94 percent of all cases. The CDC defines an outbreak as three or more cases. Half of those outbreaks were associated with close-knit religious or cultural communities that were undervaccinated, accounting for 88 percent of all cases.
In response to the record number of cases this year, New York City has imposed a mandatory vaccination order, and Rockland County has required that anyone with measles avoid public spaces or face a $2,000-a-day fine. In California, hundreds of college students were quarantined last week after one student with measles attended classes on three days while contagious at the University of California at Los Angeles, and another contagious person spent hours at a library at California State University Los Angeles. As of early Monday, 343 students and employees remained under quarantine and have been told to stay home and avoid contact with others as much as possible.
The rare and extreme measures reflect the seriousness of this year’s outbreaks. In a statement Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said, “We have come a long way in fighting infectious diseases in America, but we risk backsliding and seeing our families, neighbors, and communities needlessly suffer from preventable diseases.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/04/29/us-officials-say-measles-cases-hit-year-record/?utm_term=.fa9e012cba90&wpisrc=al_health__alert-hse--alert-national&wpmk=1
