Just curious. I haven’t seen much just that there have been some small outbreaks? The virus just doesn’t appear. It has to come from somewhere.
Just curious. I haven’t seen much just that there have been some small outbreaks? The virus just doesn’t appear. It has to come from somewhere.
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Measles was mostly eliminated in the US through a vaccination campaign. A lot of complete fucking morons now believe that vaccines are bad, and don’t vaccinate their kids. So now we’ve got measles outbreaks again.
Unlike smallpox measles was not eradicated globally (and even some smallpox remains because the US and Russia refuse to destroy the samples they maintain for weapons uses) so it is important to keep up vaccinations.
Measles functionally was gone, but it was still lingering around. Most people are immune, so it doesn’t really poke it’s head up to much. But then someone who isn’t immune get exposed to a carrier, and now it gets started.
measles is a virus that can be vaccinated against.
it is basically a tug of war.
same with other viruses like the flu
Measles wasn’t 100% gone, just really rare. You can see here, there have been at least a handful of cases every year https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death?time=1949..latest
>Just curious. I haven’t seen much just that there have been some small outbreaks? The virus just doesn’t appear. It has to come from somewhere.
It can just appear, it exists in the wild — it also exists in the US every year and in other countries. Someone with measles travels through an airport in which there are a couple of unvaccinated people and voila.
It’s the difference between controlled through vaccinations/ herd immunity and eradicated (like small pox). Measles was never eradicated, so it’s never actually been gone. We’re seeing more infections now through reduced vaccinations and breaks in herd immunity
2 main options:
1: Someone in the community or in contact with the community traveled outside the US, got infected, and brought it back since there’s a window of time where you’re contagious before you develop symptoms.
2: someone from outside the US visited the US (vacation, business trip, etc) or immigrated to the US from a country where measles is still a problem.
Edit: Definitely a 3rd option: Measles can be circulating in asymptomatic carriers who are infected but don’t get sick due to existing immunity (vaccines or prior infection. Vaccines are superior b/c they don’t come with the risk of immediate illness/death or the measles getting into your brain and re-activating 10 years down the road, killing you via untreatable measles-induced encephalitis)
We can’t know for sure without a contact-tracing effort, and that seems unlikely to happen. Pointing fingers without evidence doesn’t help anyone, so reputable news sources try not to say “It probably came from this or that place!” right now.
Thanks everybody!!! I got a blurb on TV as I was passing through the room. Figured people following on Reddit would have some insight before I start google-fuing it.
The virus was likely reintroduced by international travelers or imports.
This is a pretty ordinary occurrence, and it isn’t usually a problem. If we had maintained a heavily vaccinated population, then the virus wouldn’t have found enough vulnerable hosts to infect and would have died out again in short order (if nobody became symptomatic, we might not have even known the virus has been reintroduced). But since we have a large anti-vaccination movement in the U.S., the virus was able to spread further than it otherwise would have.
At an 82% vaccination rate, which is what Gaines County has among kindergartners, each person with measles will infect 2-3 more people. This is similar to the normal infectiousness of influenza. It takes 95% measles coverage to prevent an outbreak. An unvaccinated person can get measles from breathing the air in a room that someone with measles was in nearly 2 hrs ago. It’s just that infectious, so one person that leaves the country and gets measles there can cause an outbreak when they come back. Plus its incubation is 7-21 days(!!!) and one is infectious for 3-4 days before the telltale rash appears. We are so lucky to have a vaccine that is 93% effective for life with a single dose, 97% with two doses.
Tourism. There’s far too much reluctance about inconveniencing tourists by quarantining them.