How bad could this disease get in the US?

A landmark study of vaccination and vaccine effects on children and adolescents with measles in the US and in the era of global pandemic outbreak

Even as health officials try to stop the outbreak, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has a long history of anti-vaccination activism, has offered only tepid support for the measles vaccine, a safe and potent way to prevent infection. Kennedy has also promoted treatments including cod liver oil, steroids and antibiotics, none of which are known to be effective against measles. (Kennedy has said that he does not oppose vaccination, but that it should be a “personal” choice.)

We recommend that all leaders follow the advice of research and the consensus of evidence to their advantage. We urge policymakers to help increase the public’s confidence in vaccines, and not to undermine scientific and medical institutions. In the US, there is a real chance that this will cost lives because of the lack of leadership.

In one landmark study, for instance, researchers in Denmark recorded the vaccination status of more than 650,000 children born in the country from 1999 to 2010. They combined that data with information on diagnoses of Asperger’s Syndrome. They found no difference in incidences of autism between vaccinated and unvaccinated children (A. Hviid et al. That’s Ann. Intern. Med. 170 was written in 2019.

There is a long-term effect calledimmune amnesia. Measles can wipe out large numbers of antibodies that store the body’s memory of how to fight other diseases. Some studies show that the immune system could become more vulnerable to diseases after a certain amount of time.

Measles can kill: between about one and three cases in every 1,000 unvaccinated children is fatal. Roughly 5–6% of infected people develop pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death in young children with measles. Measles can also cause blindness or hearing loss.

What’s more, in the first 2–4 days, the illness often features symptoms — such as a fever, cough and runny nose — that can fool people into thinking they have a cold. There is a risk that people with measles won’t get along when they are highly contagious. The red spots of the disease appear several days into the illness.

In 1991, an athlete with measles in a sports stadium spread the disease to 16 other people, two of which were seated at least 30 metres away.

It is difficult to predict that. A measles outbreak is like a forest fire throwing out sparks, Moss says. If there is a spark in a state like Maryland with a high rate of immunizations, it will go away. But “if the sparks from this initial fire land in communities where vaccination rates are low, then we’re going to have multiple large outbreaks”, Moss says.

“We haven’t yet seen signs of the outbreak slowing down,” says William Moss, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.