April 12, 2024 – When a mother in Atlanta, GA, noticed
measles
symptoms in her son earlier this year after returning from an international trip, she knew just bringing him straight into a local emergency room may put others at risk.
She kept him in the car outside the ER while alerting staff inside.
“We were able to immediately bring the child in and immediately put him in an isolated room and mask and avoid potential exposures, but it could have gone very differently,” said pediatric infectious disease specialist Matt Linam, MD, whose colleagues at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta treated the patient.
The boy, who was older than 5 years of age and unvaccinated, recovered from measles after being hospitalized.
Federal health officials are urging medical and public health organizations to be on the lookout for potential measles cases as outbreaks of the disease are mounting rapidly this year.
“A lot of the symptoms of measles — fever, cough, red eyes, a rash, although it may not have developed yet — there are a lot of other things that can present that way,” Linam said. “If you’re not able to identify it very quickly and get that child and their family isolated very quickly, you can have a lot of health care exposures.”
The scenario of the mother in Atlanta giving health care workers a heads up is unusual. Numerous communities have received alerts in recent weeks that people may have unknowingly been exposed to measles in everyday places like a Walmart in
suburban Chicago
or a medical center in
California
.
Measles is so contagious that 9 out of 10 unprotected people who come in contact with it may get sick, and with cases on the rise and vaccination rates dropping, risks are spiraling in some communities.
The CDC issued a
warning
last week that the vaccination rate for measles among U.S. kindergarteners has fallen below the herd immunity rate of about 95%. Meanwhile, case counts are climbing. Within the first 3 months of 2024, the nation surpassed the total number of cases recorded in all of 2023.
The most recent CDC
tally
of nationwide measles cases stands at 113 in 2024, nearly doubling in less than 2 weeks. The pace is so quick that CDC data scientists published a projection to examine whether measles is on track for a record-breaking year.
What’s the Trajectory for Measles in 2024?
The CDC’s new estimate predicts there will be about 300 cases of measles in the U.S. this year, which is far off from the chart-topping year of 2019, when there were 1,274 cases. But 300 cases would still rank the year 2024 as fourth for most cases in the past 25 years.
In 2000, measles was declared “eliminated” in the U.S., meaning it was no longer constantly present in the country. The vaccine for measles became available in 1971, and it took the nation nearly 3 decades to achieve herd immunity, which typically occurs once about 95% of a population is vaccinated. Since 2000, measles outbreaks have been a result of unvaccinated international travelers bringing measles back to the U.S. after being infected abroad, then spreading the disease among other unvaccinated people.
But vaccination rates have slipped so far that now, there is a strong possibility that the disease will lose its “eliminated” status and once again begin to regularly circulate and spread in the U.S., according to a new CDC
report
published Thursday.
“This really may be the only infection that’s this contagious, so you really have to vaccinate to prevent transmission,” explained Catharine Paules, MD, an adult infectious diseases doctor at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA.
Paules, along with Anthony Fauci, MD, and others published a paper in the
New England Journal of Medicine
titled “Measles in 2019 – Going Backward” examining that record-setting year and recalling that the global impact of measles prior to vaccine development had been in the millions. The disease was so common that there is plenty of data about its toll on the human body, which includes the risk of 1 in 1,000 cases resulting in possibly fatal neurological complications.
…