555 measles cases spread to 20 states

That’s an increase of 90 over last week’s total

An additional 90 measles cases were reported across the nation last week, the biggest jump this year as the annual total continued its march toward record levels, federal health officials reported Monday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 555 cases have been confirmed in 20 states in 2019, the second-highest total since measles was declared eliminated in the USA in 2000.

The numbers are up sharply from a week ago, when the total number of cases stood at 465 in 19 states. The highest total since 2000 was 667 in 2014. There were 372 cases last year.

The World Health Organization reported Monday that cases rose by 300% globally in the first three months of 2019 compared with the same period in 2018 – after consecutive increases over the past two years.

The surge in the USA has been fueled in part by the anti-vaccination movement – the majority of people who contract measles have not been vaccinated, the CDC said.

Ogbonnaya Omenka, a public health expert and assistant professor at Butler University, said the fact that the last U.S. death recorded was in 2015 generated complacency toward vaccinations.

“The impacts of misinformation and lack of trust have not been fully appreciated,” Omenka told USA TODAY.

The states that reported cases to the CDC are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington.

Most of the cases this year involve 17 outbreaks – defined as three or more localized cases – in New York, New Jersey, Washington, California and Michigan, the CDC said. The outbreaks are linked to travelers who brought measles back from countries including Israel, Ukraine and the Philippines.

Measles symptoms include fever, runny nose, cough and a rash. A “very small number of those infected” can develop pneumonia, swelling of the brain or other serious symptoms, according to the CDC. Measles can cause pregnant women to deliver prematurely.

WHO said that even in high-income countries, complications result in hospitalization in up to a quarter of cases and can lead to lifelong disability, from brain damage and blindness to hearing loss. The disease is a prominent cause of death among children worldwide, and most of the 110,000 deaths in 2017 were children.

WHO said in its statement that global data for the first three months of 2019 is provisional, but it cited a “clear trend.” Outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Myanmar, Philippines, Sudan, Thailand and Ukraine are causing many deaths – mostly among children, the agency said.

“Over recent months, spikes in case numbers have also occurred in countries with high overall vaccination coverage, including the United States of America, as well as Israel, Thailand and Tunisia, as the disease has spread fast among clusters of unvaccinated people,” WHO said.

“The impacts of misinformation and lack of trust have not been fully appreciated.” Ogbonnaya Omenka Butler University