When I was a first year infectious disease fellow there was a lot of chatter about measles. A young student from India had just been diagnosed. It was another of the smattering of measles cases in Boston in that time-frame. By the time I came around though, the faculty was tired of hearing fellows presenting measles cases at the weekly fellow’s case conference. I wished I could have seen the patient. I never did get to see a case of measles, though I did manage to wow the faculty in my first couple weeks with my patient diagnoses of dengue and primary syphilis.
Fast forward to 2015 and a disease that used to be a fairly common childhood illness before the advent of vaccination in 1963 is making a horrid comeback. No, it’s not Ebola. No, for most people, it’s not going to be fatal unless perhaps they have a weakened immune system or they are a fetus in the womb of an infected woman. No, most will just be miserable for a few weeks. Fevers, irritated eyes, cough, runny nose, and the classic rash.
Maybe that’s why people are not in arms. When the first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States
was reported, people were ready to shut borders to stop Africans from entering the country. People found it intolerable for quarantined healthcare workers to go about their normal activities when they were not showing any signs of infection.
Yet, we now have a crisis on our hands. A respiratory virus that is spread by coughing, sneezing, and secretions. An infection that has affected 68 people and counting.
Measles is a vaccine preventable illness.
It is not just an annoying rash with the sniffles. Believe it or not, it actually is one of the most contagious microbes in the world. We should not be in this current predicament. The vaccine for measles has been around for more than 40
years. Since no immunization is 100 percent effective there is strength in numbers. Herd immunity that is. But if large swathes of society decide that the vaccination is not for their kids for personal, philosophical, or religious reasons then when measles gets a hold of someone in such a society it will spread.
In his “The Care of a Patient“, Dr. Peabody, a legendary physician, reminds us that we all have the ability to care
for others. We don’t live on islands of us and our children only. I think a significant number of people who refuse to vaccinate their children do so out of selfishness. Since, I don’t expect this outbreak to send them running to their pediatricians for vaccinations, I can’t sympathise with the annoyances and inconveniences they face when they get a vaccine-preventable illness like measles or even influenza for that matter, though I do think that they should somehow have to pay for the ill who would have been vaccinated if they could.
Each year since the US declared the country measles-free in 2000, measles cases have been on the rise. Fear, misunderstanding, Dr. Wakefield’s fraudulent research, vaccines-cause-autism celebrity spokespeople,
and global travel have all caused this to happen. I just hope that before we descend into the days when measles affected the lives of millions of people annually, that these mini-outbreaks remind us why a vaccine was created in the first place.
Image Credit flickr photo by Luciana Christante https://flickr.com/photos/vivacomopuder/2807017058 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
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