Some private schools have shut down because of a rapidly escalating measles outbreak in West Texas. Local health departments are overstretched, pausing other important work as they race to limit the spread of this highly contagious virus.
Since the outbreak emerged three weeks ago, the Texas health department has confirmed 90 cases with 16 hospitalizations, as of Feb. 21. Most of those infected are under age 18. Officials suspect that nine additional measles cases reported in New Mexico, across the border from the epicenter of the Texas outbreak in Gaines, are linked to the Texas outbreak. Ongoing investigations seek to confirm that connection.
Health officials worry they’re missing cases. Undetected infections bode poorly for communities because doctors and health officials can’t contain transmission if they can’t identify who is infected.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for The Immunization Partnership in Houston, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccine access. “I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
An unknown number of parents may not be taking sick children to clinics where they could be tested, said Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, Texas. “If your kids are responding to fever reducers and you’re keeping hydrated, some people may keep them at home,” she said.
Most unvaccinated people will contract measles if they’re exposed to the airborne virus, which can linger for up to two hours indoors. Those infected can spread the disease before they have symptoms. Around 1 in 5 people with measles end up hospitalized, 1 in 10 children develop ear infections that can lead to permanent hearing loss, and about 1 in 1,000 children die from respiratory and neurological conditions.
Bobby Jr says that everyone should just get the measles because he had it when he was a kid and he and his siblings all had a great old time. How lucky for them. I had the measles and don’t remember it quite so fondly. And we are lucky we didn’t get very sick and die as some people did.
More are going to die. Here’s the latest from Bobby Jr via Politico:
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to axe members of the department’s vaccine-centric panels of outside advisers who he deems to be too cozy with the drug industry, POLITICO’s Adam Cancryn scooped with your morning hosts.
The advisory committees, the most prominent of which provide recommendations to the FDA and the CDC, are made up of doctors and academics with expertise in science. While agency heads aren’t compelled to heed their advice — and have drawn controversy when they don’t — they often do…
First hit? The CDC’s panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is a likely target of the effort and perhaps the most powerful because it recommends who should be vaccinated. HHS confirmed Thursday that the group’s three-day meeting that had been scheduled to begin on Wednesday is postponed.
[…]
Reaction (or lack thereof): Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine inventor and member of the FDA’s outside panel, said Kennedy’s assertion that doctors like him are too conflicted to serve on those committees is baseless, as members are regularly vetted for conflicts of interest. “What he really means is, ‘They haven’t supported my fixed, immutable notion that vaccines are dangerous,’” Offit told Prescription Pulse.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the health panel chair who secured Kennedy’s commitment to leave ACIP unchanged in exchange for his vote to confirm, was noticeably silent Thursday. In a Wednesday X post, the Louisiana Republican defended Kennedy’s remarks at an HHS welcome event.
When asked about the ACIP delay, one former congressional staffer, after using an expletive, said: “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”
They’re all going to have blood on their hands.
This poignant letter from author Roald Dahl in 1960 tells the story of what can happen:
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.
On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.
It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion, parents who now refuse to have their children immunized are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunization is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.
Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunized, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.
So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunized?
They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunization! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunization.
So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunized.
The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunization should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach‘. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG‘, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
Bobby Jr has already had a hand in killing dozens of babies and little kids in Samoa by propagandizing against the measles vaccine. Now he’s bringing his sick show to a town near you.