What You Need to Know About Measles
Here’s what the measles comeback means for you
After months of lab tests, patient interviews, and emergency vaccinations, public health officials in Clark County, Washington, announced that the local measles outbreak was finally over. It was late April 2019 and 71 people — nearly all of them children — had contracted measles since the start of the year.
While county health officials could not say for certain how measles had arrived in their community, the likeliest source was a measles-infected child who had recently returned from Ukraine — a country where public distrust of government coupled with anti-vaccination social media campaigns have helped fuel the largest measles epidemic Europe has seen in decades. During one recent two-month stretch beginning at the end of 2018, more than 15,000 Ukrainians were infected with measles and 15 died.
“You need two things for a measles outbreak,” says Dr. William Moss, a professor of epidemiology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine. “You need a susceptible population, and then you need an infectious individual to bring measles into that population.” Clark County, Washington, had both.
