The news about the latest measles outbreak keeps getting worse. To recap, Europe saw 30 times more measles cases in 2023 than it did in 2022, leading the UK to declare a “national incident.” Despite the US declaring measles eliminated in 2000, the country has also seen clusters of cases pop up in several states. In February, the World Health Organization warned that due to vaccination disruptions during Covid, more than half of the world will be at “high or very high risk” of an outbreak.
Unfortunately, the first three months of 2024 were not much better for the US. Last week, the CDC said that thanks to a “sharp rise” in cases, we may have officially lost our elimination status. Out of the 338 recorded cases since 2020, approximately 100 have been reported *this year alone.* Doing the math, that means there were around 78 cases per year in 2020-2023, but we’ve surpassed that number just three months into 2024. Yikes. And yes, almost all cases have been in people who are either unvaccinated or have an unknown vax status.
Symptoms to look for: Symptoms include a high fever, cough, runny nose and watery eyes — but the most notable symptom is the red rash, which often covers the entire body. Complications include pneumonia and encephalitis, which is when the brain swells.
“Much more serious than chickenpox:” “Measles is much more serious than the chickenpox,” Farber tells PEOPLE. “A significant number will have a complication requiring hospitalization.”
US measles cases by the numbers: Since the beginning of 2020, the U.S. has recorded a total of 338 cases — but 29% of those cases have been reported since this year alone. As the CDC says, “The rapid increase in the number of reported measles cases during the first quarter of 2024 represents a renewed threat to elimination.” The cases were reported “almost all in persons who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. As of the end of 2023, U.S. measles elimination status was maintained.”
Where the outbreaks are: The CDC noted that nearly in all the cases, those infected by measles had either traveled internationally, or spent time with someone who had. In March, the Cincinnati Health Department warned that there was a potential for a measles exposure at a Disney on Ice performance. Earlier, officials in Virginia flagged two airports — Dulles International Airport or Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport — as being the sites of potential measles exposures. And in Philadelphia, there was a confirmed outbreak of measles, where one child may have been the source of infection for at least seven people at a daycare center and hospital.
An “extraordinarily contagious” airborne virus: “The virus is transmitted by direct contact with infectious droplets or by airborne spread when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes,” the CDC says.
“If you take one person with measles. and you put them in a room with 10 others, and if they’re not immune, then nine out of those 10 will get measles just from airborne spread,” Farber tells PEOPLE. “It’s extraordinarily contagious.”
The virus can live in air for two hours: You don’t need to be in the same room as an infectious person either, as the CDC notes, “measles virus can remain infectious in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves an area. There’s no comparison to a cold. It’s nothing like a cold.”
Vaccinate your children, please: The agency ended its alert encouraging everyone to get vaccinated, adding that while the risk of transmission is low because of high population immunity, vaccination coverage remains below the amount “necessary to prevent sustained measles transmission.”
For the umpteenth time, vaccines do not cause autism: As for those who are hesitant to get the vaccine or give it to their child, Farber said, “there’s no evidence, at all, that this MMR causes autism or any other serious problems. And measles does. It’s very sad to see preventable diseases. We eliminated measles, from a practical basis, in the year 2000 and now it’s back.”
According to the CDC’s website, as of April 11, there have been a total of 121 cases reported in the US. 57 of those cases were children under age five. The biggest outbreak is in Illinois, and the highest week of reported cases was the week of March 17. You can check out all of the stats on their website, which is updated every Friday. It’s truly frustrating and terrifying because we should be moving forward as a country and not backwards into an era in which potentially deadly and formerly eradicated viruses are making a comeback. The anti-vaccine and anti-science movement in this country (and worldwide) has caused immeasurable damage to public health. Hopefully, WHO can help bridge the vaccination gaps in other countries and the actual threat of infection in the US wakes people up. I bet there are also parents who haven’t given their children the MMR vaccine because they figured it they didn’t need to since measles were eradicated. I don’t know how many of those parents are out there, but there’s nothing like the threat of measles at Disney on Ice to get some butts in gear.
Photos credit: Dennis Van Tine / Avalon, Alejandro Ernesto/picture-alliance/Cover Images
I just can’t with stupid people not vaccinating their children for diseases that can kill your children. If you are concerned then space the vaccines out it is offered.
We can thank all the anti-vaxxer morons for this-including those “health influencers”. Poor people get vaccinated. It’s the idiots who “do their own research” and people like Jenny McCarthy who for years blamed her kid’s autism on vaccines (thanks to one discredited study.) Anyone who’s a fan of RFK Jr know that he is also on board with this lunacy.
Measles causes real suffering in those who get it. Why would anyone risk subjecting their kids to something that terrible?
I know vaccines dont cause autism, but these idiots believe it. What gets me is, these parents would rather have their child DIE than get autism. So not only are they idiots, they are @ssholes too.
Thank you for making this point! My son is autistic and I can’t stand the moms who talk like having an autistic kid is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. And autistic children (and adults) are awesome, so it’s really a shame there are such horrible @ssholes out there who are capable of reproducing.
Here in Costa Rica vaccinations for minors are mandatory by law. If you don’t vaccinate your kid you can and will be charged with medical neglect of a minor and the kid is getting vaccinated. When parents weren’t vaccinating girls for HPV the national health service set up shop at schools and vaccinated kids there. Also no exceptions, if you want a medical exception you need to go through a board of specialists. (Religious exemption for vaccination are insane for me) We have the same vaccine schedule as the US except we add a TB shot.
❤️
RFK, Jr is a delusional ant vaxxer running for president working with the Trump campaign, so he is meant to take votes from idiots who see his last name and think he stands for liberal values.
Please spread the word – friends don’t let friends vote for dangerous lunatics!
US expat living in the NLs here. There are a good number of antivaxxers, but the largest communities of unvaccinated people are actually in the Dutch bible belt. Whooping cough has already killed children here this year and lots have been hospitalized. They’ve been trying to get those parents to immunize their kids, but there’s a lot of Christian group pressure not to. One of the reasons the government is pleading with these people is because measles and whooping cough can have horrible lasting consequences including brain damage. Please take care of your children and other people. There are a lot of vulnerable people who are in danger from these diseases!
Next stop: polio! I wish Dad were still with us, he’d tell you how much fun he had with polio during his life time! That was the first thought in my mind when I read this, especially in the wake of Paul Alexander’s death (truly an amazing guy and an inspiration: in an iron lung from the age of 6 until his death at 78, he was a lawyer, an author, even a TikTocker!)
Vaccinate your damn kids people! Sometimes, the worst side effect of a vaccine preventable illness is not death.
Look at Joni Mitchell, her polio symptoms came back later in life. There is no reason to risk contracting these diseases.
My granddad was horribly disabled by polio.
My kids are fully vaccinated, and I am super jazzed they’ll never experience shingles. I’m too young for the shingles vaccine, and my oncologist wants me to wait, but when I tell you the pain from shingles (DIRECTLY OVER MY FLIPPING MASTECTOMY SCARS) is some of the worst I’ve ever experienced? I mean it.
And hey, adults? You can also update your MMR and Tdap!
If you’re going to visit a child less than a year old, definitely check your TDaP status and get a booster before visiting, TDaP is Tetanus, Diphtheria and Pertussis aka whooping cough which newborns have no immunity to and don’t get immediately vaccinated for.
Also, for those of us who played Oregon Trail…..we so would have won if Diphtheria hadn’t killed us
You’re reminding me that I need to go next week and get my second shingles vax!!
I am juuuuuuust old enough to have known a few people with limited mobility due to polio. When you see what happened before widespread vaccination, it makes an impression! I wonder if we will have to have children start unaliving or going blind or deaf for these folks to understand that our life expectancy mostly went up due to vaccines reducing child mortality!
My ex’s cousin got measles when he was three months old and it developed to meningitis. He survived but became deaf.
Since he lived in the country there was no school for him and he had to go to boarding school and live apart from his family from when he was ten years old.
His childhood and also adult life could have been so different.
My heart aches for the kids and rages at the parents. There’s another horror lurking behind these numbers. Somewhere between 1:600 and 1:10,000 kids will fully recover from the measles and then 7-10 years later they’ll develop something called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis SSPE. Basically, their brain melts. There is no cure. It’s 95% fatal and it usually takes 1-3 years to die. That’s what these monsters are gambling with. Vaccines are such a hard-won miracle and they’re throwing it all away.
I’m old enough to remember when measles and polio were not preventable. I had measles at 4 or 5 and it was horrible, as was mumps. Chicken pox was mostly just uncomfortable for a week or so. Polio was the really scary one. My mother, an RN, was terrified that her kids would get it. Then in the early fifties, the Salk polio vaccine was developed. I still remember the big cattle call at the local elementary school gym where we all got vaccinated as soon as it was available. It is nothing less than tragic that in the early 21st century there are people spewing misinformation about all the amazing vaccines that 20th century medical research developed and distributed to the general population.
I have no sympathy for people who won’t vaccinate their children.
But for the children?
They’re probably vaccinated-it’s their children who will get it.
Last week I saw a post on a “Moms of” FB page. This particular gem-of-a-Mom was asking for a pediatric practice that did not require vaccines. She was *outraged* that her doctor would not take her kids into his practice without. Truly disturbing how many like-minded “moms” flooded the comments with things like “run from that practice and don’t look back”, “I know mine did the same thing. they can’t force me – it’s not their choice” blahblahblah. Of course you are entitled to leverage your medical expertise to choose to expose your kids like that. And the doctor is equally entitled to leverage his to choose not to expose his practice to whatever plague your kids might walk in with. These are serious debilitating and/or deadly diseases – and you wouldn’t know because you’ve never experienced mass outbreaks … because you’re all vaccinated. Duh.
I personally have seen the birth defects that can happen if a pregnant woman gets measles.. it’s devastating and absolutely heartbreaking. Get vaccinated while the gop still allows women that choice.
I’m going to take this time to get on my soapbox and issue one of my sermons.
I’m a ridshare driver who still follows all covid era protocols (disinfecting, I wear a mask). The overwhelming majority of rideshare drivers barely clean their cars and they definitely don’t disinfect it or wear a mask.
Most rideshare cars are ROLLING PETRI DISHES. Riders sneeze, cough, and breathe out all sorts of germs. It is truly disgusting and I’m not even a germaphobe.
Please wear a mask in your rideshare rides and use hand sanitizer after it (or even during!).
I took a cab recently. I had on a mask, the driver had on a mask, the windows were cracked, AND there were TWO prominently displayed bottles of hand sanitizer reachable from the back passenger seat. Yay! I tipped very well.
That is awesome and thank you for tipping! So many people don’t tip even though the driver has gone above and beyond.
The biggest ongoing outbreak is in the Chicago area and the majority of cases stem from a shelter housing migrants. So even though the anti-vaxxer movement among U.S. parents is extremely troubling, in this case the outbreak was not solely caused by unvaccinated U.S. children but was brought here by migrants.
Still wouldn’t be a problem IF U.S children were vaccinated, no?
On the day that a case was announced in a migrant shelter, a case was also announced from a non-migrant patient. There is a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment right now in Chicago (where I live) but the story that some want to tell, that migrants are bringing measles, is not the entire story. Also, I think the Health Department did a good job of immediately isolating anyone who was exposed and unvaxxed and getting those that needed it caught up on their shots.
Pediatric NP here. The number of parents declining vaccines has skyrocketed since the pandemic/Trump era. Most of these parents aren’t concerned about a possible link to autism anymore. The thing about the anti-vax movement is they’ll continue to find a new justification for their arguments once one has lost popularity. At this point, most of these parents are under the belief that the “side effects” of vaccines or risk of vaccine injury outweigh the benefits, as the likelihood of getting many vaccine-preventable illnesses is perceived as low. I’ve also seen a shift in the demographics of parents who refuse vaccines from “earthy-crunchy” to Christian conservatives who don’t trust science, the CDC, or government involvement in their lives (except in cases of reproductive rights rights, of course). I’ve had families who got the flu shot every year for their kids until 2020 when our *very* blue state was going to make it mandatory for school attendance (didn’t end up happening). I’m exhausted by the cognitive dissonance of refusing vaccines but demanding antibiotics for a virus, of how I could be perceived to be recommending poisonous vaccines but then trusted in the remaining aspects of care.
Do such people seem to consciously realize that their own likelihood of getting these preventable illnesses is “low” because they are happy to have other parents assume these perceived “risks”on behalf of their own respective children? The toxic selfish individualism is horrifying to me — but not surprising.
FWIW, never having had the flu, I was convinced to get a flu shot by a school nurse who finally said: “You’re not just getting it for you. You’re getting it for the vulnerable people around you that you don’t want to infect”. I genuinely hadn’t understood that, and I’ve been getting them annually ever since. So education CAN spur at least some of the reluctant folks.
Major props to Nurse Nicole!
Many of them believe that the reason these diseases are less common today is not because of vaccines but because of improved sanitation. I wish you could make this sh— up.
I truly think this a product of generations of us having been vaccinated and living long enough without these horrible diseases that people can convince themselves it was never that bad to begin with. If you’ve never seen a case of measles or even heard of anyone getting it, it’s probably not that hard to convince yourself that you’re getting shots for nothing, especially if you are in a confirmation bubble. I hope these people are terrified into getting their shots and that states and localities start to crack down on letting unvaxxed people into public spaces like schools and public transportation.
Thank goodness that the vaccine departments of the pharmaceutical corporations are immune from the corruption that is rampant throughout the rest of them. Sure, they’ll sell us poorly tested and produced products that addict us and kill us but the vaccines are perfect. Asking questions makes you a crazy person! Buy into the capitalist driven science and shame the parents speaking up for their vaccine injured children.
🙄
Chicago has one of the highest MMR vaccination rates in the country, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health. The measles case count includes both Chicago residents and non-residents associated with the current outbreak (i.e., migrants who stayed at the shelter that was the source of the outbreak). It can’t be determined from the case counts how many are attributable to residents vs non-residents. In 2023, there were 5 measles cases in Illinois and before that, none since 2019. The current outbreak is not part of a trend in which measles cases have been increasing each year in Illinois, which may suggest that it is attributable to the migrant shelter outbreak more so than to residents who aren’t vaccinated. I think this is important for people to be aware of since it is not being widely reported.
“current outbreak is not part of a trend in which measles cases have been increasing each year in Illinois, which may suggest that it is attributable to the migrant shelter outbreak more so than to residents who aren’t vaccinated.”
Ok, so let’s say for argument’s sake that migrants, who may be unvaccinated, ARE spreading measles. Do you think that the measles virus can detect who is a US Citizen vs a migrant and will only affect the migrants? I’m just not sure what difference it makes even if a migrant was patient zero, MANY US Citizens are choosing not to vaccinate their kids and those kids will now be at risk for measles, not because of migrants but because of their parents choice not to vaccinate.
The biggest problem with measles is that it effectively erases a lot of previous immune development. That’s why it’s so dangerous. You’re not just getting sick with measles. It’s taking out a lot of your previous built-up immunity and makes you susceptible to those illnesses again. I’m surprised they aren’t hammering this in when they discuss it. My friend caught it a few years back because her titrate levels fell low enough to reinfect, and since then, she’s seen a huge jump in the number of colds she gets per year.
Maybe if we spread the word that contracting mumps can leave your baby boy deaf and sterile that might garner some increase in vaccination compliance, especially amongst MAGA fathers.
I had the measles vaccine not sure if it was the MMR combo back then, but when I got pregnant I was tested and it came back that I was not immune. So after the birth I got a booster… if it’s been decades since your MMR shots you might need another one!!!!! Immunity can go away.
If you are older, you may want to look at getting a booster. There was a report of a case going through one of the airports I was to be going through when I worked on the road, so I called the clinic and got one. Even if I was a low risk, I did not want to possibly pass it on, or get sick later on, after being in several planes and locations.
The amount of people that don’t vaccinate blow my mind. What also gets me is the fact that the majority of these parents HAVE been vaccinated. What the actual f is wrong with people? The fact that the word polio is even in the vocabulary anymore is terrifying.
I agree with the poster earlier that said if it was made known that mumps can make boys deaf and sterile, you might get more people to do it. It’s not like anyone cares about women’s health, but heaven forbid anything disrupt the sacred sacs of the precious ones. (I am the mother of a son and a grandmother to a grandson, btw, both of whom are vaccinated.)
This is your friendly reminder to please get your MMR boosters!!! I am completely vaxxed but I never took a booster after the the one I had when I was around 12 and to my surprise, when I did my immunity test when I was pregnant in my 30s, it turned out I did not have immunity against Rubella or Measles, so please everyone get your boosters. And it’s wild because I did do my immunity test in my late 20s and I still did have immunity, so it’s crazy how a few years difference had an effect!