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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.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:19PM
This is completely incorrect. Before vaccines they recorded 400k cases a year on average in the US. That was an underestimation since when they checked for antibodies they found it in nearly everyone by the time they were 20. So really there were ~ 2million cases a year. Now, there are less than a thousand and it is a big deal.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday July 06 2015, @12:55AM
Look at this graph. It is derived from US CDC data, and can be found at various places around the Web:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RXRGd-_ZFy4/U6IWzEJOe2I/AAAAAAAABCU/eN6Cfc1i-a4/s1600/Measles+Mortality+1900-1984+-+NonLog+Scale.jpg [blogspot.com]
Your statistics are misleading at best, and simply wrong in any case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:15AM
That is a graph of mortality rates, people whose deaths were attributed to measles. Most people get measles and do not die from it. It is certainly true and very interesting that the mortality rates dropped so drastically independent of any vaccination campaign, but that chart does not show that measles was eradicated. I suspect that the severity of a case of measles is related to nutrition. This brings up the interesting question of whether that decrease in mortality is reflective of a more general decrease in severity of measles, and whether moderate cases are diagnosed as such.