About a month ago, we discussed the measles outbreak in Europe and community spread within the United States. In 2023, Europe saw 30 times more measles cases than it did in 2022, causing the UK to declare a “national incident” due to the significant public health risk. Although the US declared the highly-contagious virus to be eliminated back in 2000, clusters of cases have been popping up in several states.
It’s frustrating enough that a formerly eradicated virus is making a completely preventable comeback, but this is a scenario that can very well have devastating consequences worldwide. In a pretty scary warning, the World Health Organization said last week that by the end of the year – yes, *this year* – more than half the world will be at a “high or very high risk” of having measles outbreaks due to “big gaps” in vaccine programs during Covid. The immunization setbacks are a result of “the Covid-19 pandemic, associated disruptions, and Covid-19 vaccination efforts” all putting a strain on health systems.
“What we are worried about is this year, 2024, we’ve got these big gaps in our immunization programs, and if we don’t fill them really quickly with the vaccine, measles will just jump into that gap,” Natasha Crowcroft, a Senior Technical Adviser on Measles and Rubella with the WHO, said during a press briefing in Geneva.
“We can see, from data that’s produced with WHO data by the CDC, that more than half of all the countries in the world are going to be at high or very high risk of outbreaks by the end of this year,” she added.
Measles, according to the WHO, is a “highly contagious, serious airborne disease caused by a virus that can lead to severe complications and death.”
While it is most common in children, it can affect anyone. Symptoms include a high fever, cough, runny nose and a rash all over the body.
Last year, more than 300,000 cases were reported worldwide, marking a 79% increase from 2022, Crowcroft said on behalf of the WHO. Global vaccination rates, she added, have slipped to 83%. Figures for deaths have not yet been completed, Crowcroft revealed.
This year, a total of 20 measles cases have been reported by 11 jurisdictions across the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York City, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia have all had cases, the organization said.
I think we all knew that the pandemic was going to expose every flaw in the system, but my goodness, the public health repercussions are like the gift that keeps on giving. What we’re seeing now are the effects of a combination of lack of access, placing priorities elsewhere, and a very intense war against vaccines. I totally understand the issues that the pandemic caused, with immunization programs put on hold for obvious reasons and resources stretched thin to focus on the Covid vax rollout. Hopefully, we can bridge enough of the gaps there and avoid the worst-case scenario.
What I don’t understand, though, are the anti-vax parents. The movement has become a public menace that’s led to measles outbreaks before. Back in 2019, UNICEF directly named decreasing childhood vax rates as a “pathway” to measles outbreaks that were happening at the time. I don’t get it. The measles can be dangerous for children and the vaccine has been proven to be safe and effective! Why wouldn’t you want to help keep your kid from catching a potentially deadly virus? It boggles the mind.
photos credit: IMAGO/BL/BSIP/Avalon, Dennis Van Tine/Avalon, ulrich niehoff/ImageBROKER/Avalon, IMAGO/Joa Souza/ Avalon
There are people having measles and chicken pox parties -meaning having children over to their home in Order to get them infected and immunized. There is a huge outbreak of whooping cough currently in Europe-authorities are going into schools checking the vaccination status of Kids and vaccinating them on the spot if needed.
I don’t want to judge although I do have an opinion. Just giving a glimpse at what the Situation is like in Europe atm
i am in the midlands in Ireland and a local man died from measles about three weeks ago. Health authorities are trying to trace anyone he had contact with, but he worked as a bus driver so the contact trace numbers are going to be huge. His family are appealing to people to get vaccinated so they don’t have to grieve like they are.
Ha- those chicken pox party people are gonna get shingles someday and then get to contemplate what they signed their kids up for unnecessarily.
Shingles is absolutely on the list of conditions I would like to avoid, and I was thrilled I could get my kid past both chicken pox and shingles thanks to la vaccine.
Srsly, can’t-be-told disease is particularly pernicious and has a high morbidity and mortality rate.
Also, we all knew we were in a new era when (non public health non medical) elected officials were dispensing medical advice via tweet.
If you had chicken pox as a child, the virus is dormant in your body for decades afterwards and may cause an active case of shingles in middle age or even old age. My aunt had shingles when she was 91 and she was in agony. I had chicken pox when I was five and shingles when I was past 70. Chicken pox was five days of an itchy rash that cleared up with no problem. Shingles was three weeks of hell. It feels like all your nerve endings have been lit up and set on fire. The pain is absolutely excruciating. As soon I could, once it was gone, I got the double-dose Shingrix vaccine. It’s supposed to be 90% effective in preventing a recurrence. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. I wouldn’t even wish this on Donald Trump.
I also had chicken pox (Born in 1975) as a kid.
That’s why I got the shingles vaccine last year. Will have to get a refresh now. It is normally recommended for people over 50years but in certain cases you might get the shot earlier.
@Carmen I’m with you. I had shingles about ten years ago and it was absolute misery. I have permanent nerve damage from it and have to take daily medication. I urge everyone to get the shingles vaccination. Also, as a parent, I can’t imagine the guilt if I had been anti-vax and my child came down with measles. These anti-science people are fools.
I’ll be judgy: There is a whooping cough outbreak at the moment sending very young children into the hospital in the NLs. Most cases are Bible belt (yes, the NLs has one) related, though antivaxxers have also contributed to the spread. The problem is that the choice not to vax your kid puts others at risk! If you want to keep your child indoors and not mingle with society (which is abusive), then it’s not that much of an issue for the public. However, if you work and need to enter your child into day care, you hope that the place is safe. It’s so frustrating that diseases that can cause major illnesses, sometimes life-long consequences (IQ), or even death are now a problem for society again because parents just don’t want to immunize!
I completely agree with part of what you said ML-
Very young children can’t truly grasp the issues involved in vaccinating and their parents should be to make a true fiduciary decision that incorporates both their parental beliefs as well as doing their best to consider what that child may want as an adult.
I worked with an attending on inpatient who had never gotten chicken pox as a child, we had a chicken pox patient, he was afraid to even be on the floor because if he caught it at that age he could die.
When my grandmother was a nurse, everyone had something, a withered arm, blind in one eye, hard of hearing, a limp, scars—nurses all ended up positive for TB. We could go back to the 1920s, have regular outbreaks and wards full of rubella, etc. Some people have to learn the hard way.
This!! People have total historical amnesia about how bad things used to be — my grandma told me that hearing a child with whooping cough is the worst sound on earth. I also worry that it is going to get worse before it gets better and lots of kids will be hurt, if not killed
My mom says that too, that people have amnesia.
When I was a small kid my brother and I both had whooping cough. His was worse than mine, we were quarantined for most of one summer. My parents said they thought my brother was going to pass at one point he was so sick with it. Fast forward to now, he’s fine, no long term damage, his lungs are fine. But me, I can have a cold in the morning and it’ll be bronchitis in the afternoon and on the verge of pneumonia by the evening. My lungs can’t handle anything. I have never been able to be in a Smokey room. I was very concerned about Covid because of my damaged lungs – and that was from whooping cough when I was four. (I’m 47 now.) People have no idea what they are doing.
My grandpa’s brother died at the age of three from diphtheria in the 1920s before vaccine was widely available- and it is an easily preventable infection with vaccines. Would be tragic if that has a resurgence too.
WITAF to all of that. I couldn’t imagine bringing my child to a party with the intention of infecting then with a f’n disease… my god people have lost their damn minds.
Back in the day, BEFORE we had vaccines there was only one way to acquire immunity and that was via infection. Exposure is statistically inevitable, so you want to acquire immunity as safely and early as possible. It could be a reasonable decision to try to choose WHEN to expose your child in order to have the best odds of recovery without lasting damage, and to minimize school absences. Many people still thought it was an unethical decision, but there was a rational argument based on a realistic assessment of risk. It’s a lot more dangerous to catch childhood diseases as an adult.
TODAY it’s just child abuse because there are lower risk options to protect your child and they’re called vaccines. The risk of damage from the vaccine is still lower than the risk of damage from a childhood infection. None of the available options are risk-free, but people like to lie to themselves.
I’ve heard from a member of faculty that there are 3 cases of whooping cough at an Upper East Side private high school in Manhattan. (The school is named after a color in case anyone is interested.) I’ve heard from a staff person that there are a number of kids attending private schools in Manhattan who have gotten ‘religious exemptions’ so they don’t have to be vaccinated. Their parents must be closet Trumpers who’ve been taken in by the bogus anti-vaxx QAnon conspiracy theories online. It’s unbelievable that it’s 2024 and now I have to worry that my husband and I need to get booster shots for whooping cough. Social media has a responsibility to stop people from spreading conspiracy theories that endanger public health.
Don’t discount the parents who want to raise their kids “naturally”. In my experience, the upper-class hippies are just as anti-vax as the MAGA and QAnon crowd, if not worse. There’s a reason Gwenyth has them as her target audience.
There is a measles outbreak right now in Alabama, and the head of the state health department (a Republican, of course) said it should be up to the parents whether or not to send a child with a confirmed case of measles to school.
To SCHOOL?!?! 😬
Can you believe it? The man is a complete and utter quack. As soon as I read about it I said they should bring back to good old days of tar and feathers.
In Florida, they are specifically telling parents to go ahead and send children exposed to measles to school/daycare. The GOP is intentionally trying to cause more outbreaks while discouraging vaccination. It’s like they’re actively trying to get the vaccination rate so low that there’s no herd effect which can then also increase the risk of mutation that would require updates to the standard vaccinations that were effective in essentially eradicating measles. Considering that measles completely wipes out a person’s immune system “memory,” the GOP isn’t just taking us back to the dark ages on social issues, they seem to want to do the same when it comes to health & medicine as well. Couple that with them continuously chipping away at both consumer and employee protections, they’re making it clearer and clearer that they actively driving us back to the days of feudalism
it’s like they want to kill off their own base. measles can come back 6-8 years later and cause permanent blindness and nerve damage!
Right?! Are they trying to harm children. This is one of the most messed things I have read (one of), that the Repubs are in favor of.
This also happened earlier in Florida (no surprise). Their surgeon general announced it’s up to parents.
Even if you’re an adult, it would be worthwhile to get a titer and see if you’re still protected. I’m 57 yrs old and got a MMR titer done 2 yrs ago (potential job assignment required it). It showed virtually no protection, even though I had convinced myself that I had gotten boosted while in college in the late 80s. Needless to say, I got another shot!
On the flip side, varicella titer looked great because I’d done my Shingrix shots 2 years prior to that. Get your shots if you can, folks
Great advice – thank you!!
Absolutely true that an MMR booster is worth looking into if you are in your 40s-50s. Many of us had only a single series and would not have also been exposed to the virus like those older than us. I had no idea until I was travelling to a country where it was possible people would be more vulnerable and my travel nurse suggested the booster. More glad than ever that I got it! But then again, unlike anti-vaxxers, I am not enthusiastic about harming children. 😒
MIA4S – travel clinic is the smartest move! I am regularly telling my patients to go to travel clinic before international travel. Sometimes they say oh the group leader said no vaccines are required to get in to the country other than what we already had.
Nope. So then we look up the cdc recommended vaccines for whatever country and I give them the lowdown in how miserable all of those diseases are.
If you were born between 1970 and 1996 you my have only received one shot. Please check your immunization records and titers.
If you’re pregnant and unsure, please wear a respirator style mask if there are cases in your area.
My grandmother lost her hearing in one ear because of measles. She also lost 2 sisters the same night when it went through her family. Please get vaccinated.
That’s the same advice from public health here for anyone born between 1970-1996.
I had a MMR booster a couple of years ago.
I did this about six years ago when there was a mumps outbreak in Philadelphia, and had no rubella titers. I got an updated MMR the very next day after I got my lab results because I was going to be traveling to the area a few weeks later.
I enthusiastically get every vaccine my doctor recommends. I got my Shingrix series over a year earlier than I had to because I knew so many people who got shingles during the pandemic, and none of them were over the age of 45! I asked my doctor if there was any reason other than the clinical trial population that the cutoff was 50, and he was like “nah, my cousin got it at 33, but you might have to pay out of pocket and each shot is about $180.” I asked him which was more painful, 400 bucks or shingles. Point made. And my insurance ended up covering my second shot.
My mom already had her shots for shingles, but my dad didn’t. However, Beiber being public about having Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (shingles affecting the facial nerves) finally motivated my dad to get his. Where I live we can’t get it under age, even paying out of pocket, though.
I’m in that age group where they were only giving one shot. I found vaccine records for my younger sister and she got two. I’ve been crossing my fingers that I may have gotten two as well since we both went to the same pediatrician. I brought it up with my current doctor who said it couldn’t hurt to get an MMR booster, but insurance probably wouldn’t cover it.
I was at my doctor’s office for a Td booster and asked to get my MMR titres tested. My doc’s nurse just offered me the shot instead. That way I didn’t need to get blood drawn, wait for results and potentially come back. So I took the shot.
The UK does not offer the chicken pox vaccine as a routine childhood vaccination. Parents have the option of having it done privately (£180 per jab, and two are required), so the vast majority of children just get chicken pox. Cases always break out in autumn and spring in primary schools.
My husband got shingles in his late 30s and consequently our 9 month old daughter broke out in chicken pox a few weeks later (shingles can transmit chicken pox but not vice versa) before I could get her vaccinated privately. When my second was born we had him jabbed as soon as possible!
This anti vax mentality is nothing short of insanity. Back in early summer 2020 the American Society for Microbiology released a press statement saying that MMR could help reduce the worst effects (like sepsis) of covid 19, so I got one in early 2021. I’ve been following these increasing outbreaks and just got my 86 year old mom to get an mmr late last week. She’s made it through one (maybe two) bouts of covid. I want to keep her here as long as possible.
It is incomprehensible to me that parents wouldn’t want to protect their kids from easily avoided public health disease threats. I was always so sad at the height of the pandemic to see so many littles in stores with their moms, masks nowhere to be seen.
Masking isn’t difficult. I mask. I boost. Still have not had covid (unless fully asymptomatic, I guess). I really cannot imagine not protecting my kids.
As the chicken pox vaccine didn’t come out until 1995, I was of the generation of chicken pox parties. My mother sent me and my sister to all of them and we never got them…..until I was 19.
My sister got them at her sweet 16 and delightfully shared them with me. Wonder how much it contributed to my IF struggles.
That said, I don’t know anyone who died from them, but good lawd, my friend’s kid had one of the worst cases I’ve ever heard about. Eyelids, inside her vagina, just every where. it was awful.
I knew two college students who observed at a daycare in the early 1990s. Both got very sick with chicken pox and missed weeks of classes. Chicken pox may be a “childhood disease” but adults can get a nasty case and it can affect your work and school life in disastrous ways.
The Q/tRump crowd believes everything they read online AND that they have the right to make everyone else suffer the consequences of their bad choices. We live in scary times. I will never comprehend why wearing a mask, getting vaccinated and social distancing caused such anarchy.
Amen. It’s got me wondering, has this been the endgame for Republicans who have for years been trying to defund / re-regulate public education at every level. An uneducated populace who will accept extremist conspiracy theories as fact.
Who is the lovely woman in the main photo? This really is an important vaccine for parents to make sure their kids get. I feel very sorry for the children who are victims of their parents’ poor decisions. And for the immunocompromised people who will suffer as well.
Looks like Amanda Peet.
Definitely Amanda Peet.
I use to work on the road, so I got a measles booster as there were cases that went through the airports that I had to travel through. I unfortunately got chicken pox at 19 and there was no such thing as a chicken pox vaccine until my son was born, so my daughter and I are both prepared for the shingles vaccine when we are old enough.
People who willing let their kids get this crap need to have their heads checked. I have a friend who is blind in one eye and deaf in one ear from chicken pox. I have some pretty serious scars from it and the measles is absolutely horrifying. Whooping cough is torture and if you are willing to let your children suffer through that, you shouldn’t have children. People have absolutely lost their minds. Most of the parents that are all anti-vax have lived with the benefits of vaccines as they are of the vax ‘ed generations. Absolutely unbelievable.