Measles Return Confirmed In CT, 26 Others

Measles, a childhood disease that was all but wiped out by 2000 due to widespread vaccination, is making a comeback worldwide, including in Connecticut. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that 220 cases of measles have been confirmed in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

The other states are Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

The public health agency’s report covered 220 cases reported with local and state health departments as of Nov. 3, and compares to 120 cases in the United States in all of last year. At least 15 measles outbreaks — three or more linked cases — have been reported so far in 2018.

The CDC said the rise in measles in the United States can be traced to outbreaks in countries to which Americans often travel — including England, France, Germany, India, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Also, the agency said, measles is spreading in the United States in communities with unvaccinated people. For example: In 2017, 75 people were sickened in a Somali-American community in Minneapolis with poor vaccination coverage. A multi-state measles outbreak in 2015 — 147 cases — was tracked to an amusement park in California and further back to a large measles outbreak in the Philippines in 2014. Unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio were disproportionately sickened in a 2014 outbreak associated with the outbreak traced to the Philippines.

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Measles can be prevented with vaccination. A 1978 goal by the CDC to eliminate measles from the country by 1982 fell short, widespread vaccination programs caused the agency to declare measles eliminated in the United States by 2000.

Some parents refuse to vaccinate their children amid incorrect claims around the world linking the vaccines to autism, but the CDC and global health agencies like the World Health Organization recommend that children receive two doses of measles-rubella or measles-mumps rubella.

To get an idea of how highly contagious the measles virus is, an unvaccinated or immune person who shares close space with an infected person who sneezes or coughs has a 90 percent chance of contracting the illness. The measles virus lives in the nose and throat mucous of an infected person.

The virus is hearty, and can live for up to two hours in an airspace where an infected person coughed or sneezed. And people who have measles can spread it from four days before a rash appears to four days after it has cleared.

Globally, measles cases saw a 30 percent uptick in 2017 and killed an estimated 110,000 people, according to the WHO. The main reason for the increase in Europe, where 41,000 people were infected in the first six months of 2018, was the refusal by parents to have their children vaccinated, the global health agency said.

Photo via Shutterstock

Reporting by Beth Dalbey