Pediatric infectious disease doctor Paul Offit isn’t vaccinated against measles. Like many of his peers, he caught the virus as a child in the 1950s, roughly a decade before a vaccine was created. At that time the highly contagious and potentially fatal disease sickened an estimated three million to four million Americans each year. Offit has been immune ever since and likely will be for life.
For those who haven’t undergone the full-body rash, swollen eyeballs and plethora of other unpleasant symptoms of measles in order to earn a lifelong defense against the disease, the vaccine is key. After widespread adoption of the two-shot vaccine regimen in the 1990s, disease transmission decreased so much that the U.S. declared measles eliminated from the country in 2000.
But this year the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 58 measles cases in outbreaks across 17 states—a case number equal to the total measles infections reported in all of 2023. As of last week, the states with documented measles cases in 2024 are Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. The CDC has not reported any deaths, and several outbreaks are still considered active. An outbreak in Chicago that has involved at least 15 cases—several of which were among people staying in a migrant shelter in the neighborhood of Pilsen—has triggered a strong joint response from the city’s department of public health, the CDC and other local health centers to isolate infected individuals and vaccinate people who are susceptible to the disease.
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Florida also reported measles…
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