Measles in US hits highest level in 35 years

Reported cases of measles in the United States have hit their highest level in 35 years, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC has recorded 2,318 cases so far this year, higher than the 2,289 cases for all of last year, it announced on Friday. The combined number of cases in the last three years has surpassed the total in the previous 25 years.

The outbreak has already caused the deaths of three people, the first since 2015, including two children, the first of which was reportedly an unvaccinated child in Lubbock, Texas.

Twenty percent of recorded cases this year were children under 5 years old. Another 49 percent were those from 5 to 19 years old.

"We are witnessing an avoidable crisis that disproportionately hurts children," Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told media. "We should not accept this as our new normal."

Measles symptoms can appear one to two weeks after someone comes into contact with the virus. It can begin with high fever, cough and watery eyes, and a rash of red spots can appear three to five days after that. In severe cases, it can lead to potentially lethal pneumonia, or to encephalitis that can cause deafness or intellectual disability.

Five percent of children with measles will develop pneumonia, while three out of 1,000 will die from complications, the CDC reported.

The last time measle cases were this high was in 1991, when there were 9,643 cases. As recently as the 1960s, just as the vaccine was being licenced, an estimated 48,000 people were hospitalized every year due to the infection, with 400 to 500 people dying.

The vaccine is mandatory in the US, though since the COVID epidemic there has been a rise in non-medical exemptions, such as for religious or philosophical reasons.

The disease had been declared eradicated in the US in 2000. However, the number of outbreaks — 35 so far this year — are occurring due to declining vaccination rates.

All but seven states have recorded outbreaks this year, with the largest number coming from South Carolina. An outbreak in the state's Spartanburg county last year led to measles spreading to more than 1,000 people.

"There were nerves, and there was anxiety, and there was some disagreement, but the concluding story was vaccinations work and cooperative spirit gets us very far," said Reverend Scott Neely of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, which underwent contact tracing by the state's health department after it was found that an infected person had attended its annual Christmas brunch. "But also it really brought to our immediate attention that this is in our community, it's all around us, and we don't know what's going to happen."

Outbreaks are more likely when the vaccination rate in a region or community falls below 95 percent, which is seen as a key threshold for herd immunity, the CDC said.

According to the CDC, 93 percent of the cases this year were in unvaccinated people. It said that vaccination rates among kindergartners in the US had decreased from 95.2 percent during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.5 percent for the 2024-2025 school year.

The decline in vaccinations could lead to more cases of other preventable illnesses as well, Melissa Nolan, a professor of epidemiology at the University of South Carolina, told AFP.

"When you think about the people who are choosing not to vaccinate their children, these are also the people that have medical hesitancy in general," Nolan said.

Patients in Texas, where there were reportedly two deaths, have needed supplemental oxygen and respiratory support to help them deal with pneumonia, said Dr Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of Covenant Health Lubbock Service Area.

"The United States had really gotten to a point where we just didn't see these kinds of outbreaks happening. Obviously, that has changed over the last 20 something years, and so we do see outbreaks more frequently, but that that is related to how much we're vaccinating our population," Johnson said in a news conference.

"When we think about vaccine preventable illnesses, they're only preventable if we have adequate vaccination rates," she said.

shiguang@chinadailyusa.com