Since late January, 22 children and youths and two adults in Gaines County along the New Mexico border have been diagnosed with measles. All were unvaccinated. Nine were hospitalized, and, according to a Texas Department of State Health Services spokeswoman, those patients were seriously ill. Some required intensive care.
The outbreak apparently has spilled over into neighboring Lea County in New Mexico, where public health officials confirmed Tuesday that an unvaccinated teenager had measles. By the time this editorial appears, the number of patients will probably rise.
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This situation was almost 100% avoidable.
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Like grassfires, infectious diseases spread only when they have fuel. The West Texas measles outbreak has grown quickly because so many children were unvaccinated. A fully immunized population is a firebreak: The disease dies out because it cannot find new victims to infect. The vaccination rate doesn't have to reach 100%, but it must be high enough to prevent the disease from multiplying rapidly throughout the population.
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Contagious diseases are not like cancer or emphysema. If a person with colon cancer forgoes treatment, it doesn't give everyone around him cancer. With highly infectious diseases, like measles, one person's decision not to vaccinate increases the risk that she gets sick and that she will pass the virus on to someone else. Public health workers estimate that 90% of unvaccinated people who have been around someone with measles will develop the disease.
Measles is a serious illness, as evidenced by the hospitalization rate in the Gaines County outbreak. Between 1912 and 1922, an average of 6,000 Americans died annually from measles-related illness, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. The first measles vaccine became available in the early 1960s.
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Physicians and pharmacists now administer two doses of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella (also called German measles), each of which is caused by a different virus. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, vaccination rates were so consistently high that the federal government declared measles eliminated in this country in 2000. That meant any new cases had been imported by unvaccinated international travelers.
Then vaccination rates began falling, and measles came back.
To protect patients' privacy, state health officials gave only general information about the Gaines County cases, such as patients' age range and vaccination status. The spokeswoman also noted that the county has a large population of families who typically do not send their children to public schools, which may give some comfort to parents who do.
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But it didn't have to happen. The right of one person to decline a vaccination against a serious disease must be weighed against their neighbor's or colleague's or classmate's or babysitter's right not to be exposed to it. There's no reason hospital and health care workers should have been unnecessarily exposed to an easily prevented infectious disease.
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Americans eliminated this disease once. We can do it again.
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