USA TODAY International Edition
Don’t let measles rise from the grave
Vaccination hesitancy reviving deadly diseases
As the child of a pediatrician, I often went with my father on house calls. I’ll always remember the patient confined to an iron lung because of polio. When polio paralyzes muscle groups in the chest, a patient is unable to breath. She could have easily died. During my medical training, I cared for a child with encephalitis from measles. I’ve cared for children struggling with pertussis, better known as whooping cough. While assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), I saw diseases ravage communities.
Polio, measles, pertussis — all preventable by immunizations. As a pediatrician, I have experienced the supreme joy of seeing childhood diseases that had caused such suffering and loss in earlier generations become preventable, consigned to history. But this public health success story is being undercut by the modern anti-vaccination movement, which was built on discredited research published in 1998 that associated the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism.
When the WHO certified the international eradication of smallpox in 1980, measles became the leading vaccine-preventable killer of children. In addition to being one of the world’s most serious infectious diseases, measles is also one of the most contagious.
The virus can linger for up to two hours in the air of an enclosed space where an infected person has been. If you carry the measles virus, 90 percent of those near you who have not been vaccinated will also become infected.
Nineteen years ago, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eliminated in the United States because more than a year had gone by without continuous transmission of the disease. But we now face a renewed threat from a woefully familiar adversary. rates overall, but recent outbreaks of preventable diseases illustrate the significant public health threat posed by willful disregard of the efficacy and science of vaccination.
Last fall, New York experienced one of its most significant measles outbreaks in decades, with more than 200 cases across the state. Cases in Rockland County and Brooklyn were concentrated among Orthodox Jewish communities and traced to travelers returning from Israel, where measles outbreaks have been prevalent.
In January alone, the CDC has tracked measles cases in New York and Washington as well as in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon and Texas. The number of cases per state may be small, but it’s still 20 percent of our states grappling with measles at the same time.
It’s not just skepticism of legitimate scientific data that has fueled anti-vaccination behaviors. Other factors include disbelief in the seriousness of measles and other childhood diseases, as well as large families of unvaccinated children, who can amplify the potential for spread.
Vaccination exemptions
To eliminate the gaps and get New York’s immunization rates even closer to 100 percent, we are considering narrowing the state’s school vaccination exemptions. California, Mississippi and West Virginia have a narrow range of exemptions. We have been carefully analyzing the community health impacts to ensure that whatever exemptions New York allows are scientifically valid and easy to monitor.
We also want to close the vaccination gaps that result from other factors. We can do this by requiring the influenza vaccine for children in day care facilities and preschools, requiring that postsecondary students be immunized against meningococcal disease, making camp access contingent on immunization, and removing barriers to participating in immunization registries.
As the fourth most populous state in the union, New York has remained vigilant against the spread of diseases. We hope other states share our belief in making community immunity a public health priority.
This means working closely with county health officials as we have in our recent outbreak, and educating parents to help them get to the place where everyone is working to ensure a child’s health.
With measures like the ones New York is pursuing, we can protect our country not just from the diseases themselves, but also from human misconceptions that can bring deadly diseases back from the grave.