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Measles Kills First U.S. Patient Since 2003

posted by takyon on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the jenny-mckillthy dept.

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with the news of the first measles death in the U.S. since 2003. Measles kills tens of thousands of people worldwide annually. From the Washington Post:

Health officials on Thursday confirmed the country's first measles death since 2003, and they believe the victim was most likely exposed to the virus in a health facility in Washington state during an outbreak there. The woman died in the spring; a later autopsy confirmed that she had an undetected measles infection, the Washington State Department of Health said in a statement. The official cause of death was announced as "pneumonia due to measles."

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 178 people from 24 states and the District were reported to have measles from Jan. 1 through June 26 of this year. Two-thirds of the cases, the CDC noted, were "part of a large multi-state outbreak linked to an amusement park in California."

Measles were effectively eliminated in the United States in 2000, according to the CDC. Health officials have said that the disease made a comeback recently, in part because of a growing number of adults deciding to delay or abstain from vaccinating their children. Last year brought the highest number of recorded measles cases since 2000, according to the CDC. Earlier this year, President Obama acknowledged the concerns some have about effects of vaccines but said: "The science is pretty indisputable." "You should get your kids vaccinated — it's good for them," Obama said. "We should be able to get back to the point where measles effectively is not existing in this country."

takyon: Celebrity critics recently denounced California's new mandatory vaccine law.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:41AM (#205498)

    as long as the collective R0 rate is below 1

    It is not R0 that directly matters but the effective reproductive rate R=R0*S/N, where S=# Susceptibles and N=Total Population. When R is less than 1 but the disease is not eradicated, S will constantly increase. "Superspreading" is not (only) a property of the person, but the environment and population. Note that these calculations assume a homogeneously mixing population which may or may not be a good enough approximation of reality.

    The second scenario represents the impact of a vaccination programme that reaches high levels of coverage (85% of all new-borns) which are, nevertheless, not high enough to lead to eradication of the agent. However, for the first 15 years after the introduction of vaccination, it appears as if eradication has been achieved, there are no infections. Then, suddenly, a new epidemic appears as if from nowhere. This is an illustration of a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’. This is the period of very low incidence that immediately follows the introduction of a non-eradicating mass vaccination policy. This happens because susceptible individuals accumulate much more slowly in a vaccinated community. Such patterns were predicted using mathematical models in the 1980s6 and have since been observed in communities in Asia, Africa and South America7. Honeymoon periods are only predicted to occur when the newly introduced vaccination programme has coverage close to the eradication threshold.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 [nih.gov]