“The South Carolina measles outbreak is growing at an astounding speed,” reports NBC News.
“Over the last seven to nine days, we’ve had upwards of over 200 new cases. That’s doubled just in the last week,” said Dr. Johnathon Elkes, an emergency medicine physician in Greenville, South Carolina. “We feel like we’re really kind of staring over the edge, knowing that this is about to get a lot worse.”
South Carolina’s health department said today that 124 more measles cases had been diagnosed since Tuesday, bringing the state’s total to 558.
A Health Department spokesman says “eight people, including adults and children, required hospitalization for complications of the disease.”
“Because measles is so contagious and people can spread the virus up to four days before symptoms appear, each sick individual has the potential” to infect many other people, notes a pediatrician.
Back in 2000, measles had been eradicated, and was declared eliminated. But that was a time when more Americans got vaccinated against measles.
Over the last 25 years, vaccination rates have plummeted (especially over the last 5 years), and people with measles sometimes migrate into the United States. By 2013, U.S. vaccination rates for measles had fallen to 91% for 1-year-olds, similar to the vaccination rate in Mexico, and lower than the vaccination rates of Canada, England, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. Now, the vaccination rate for American 1-year-olds is closer to 80%.
So a lot more people are unvaccinated, and can catch the measles, in the United States.
By contrast, 22 nations have eliminated measles and rubella by vaccinating at rates of over 90%.
Unvaccinated children have died this year of measles in Los Angeles and Texas.
Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children”, says Our World in Data. But measles vaccination rates have fallen in the U.S., and as a result, an unvaccinated child died this year in Texas.
After vaccination rates fell, whooping cough cases jumped 14-fold in Michigan, resulting in a few deaths. Many more people are getting the disease, which makes you feel awful, as if you are coughing your lungs out. For babies, the disease can be deadly.
