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An Antivax Hotspot Near a Major US City Now Has an Emergency Measles Outbreak

Author: ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER / Source: ScienceAlert

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A quickly escalating measles outbreak around Portland, Oregon, has led health officials in nearby Clark County, Washington, to declare a public health emergency as they warn that people infected with the highly contagious virus have visited schools and churches, a dentist’s office, a Costco, an Ikea and an Amazon locker pickup station.

Someone with measles was at Concourse D of the Portland International Airport on January 7, the county’s public health department advised. An infected person attended a Portland Trail Blazers home game January 11.

At the beginning of last week, there were only a handful of confirmed cases. On Friday, the day the emergency was declared, there were 19. By Sunday, that number had grown to 21.

The latest update came Tuesday, when county officials said they had confirmed 23 cases and were investigating two more suspected cases. The vast majority of those who have fallen ill had not been immunized.

The outbreak makes concrete the fear of pediatric epidemiologists that a citadel of the movement against compulsory vaccination could be susceptible to the rapid spread of a potentially deadly disease.

“It’s alarming,” Douglas J. Opel, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

“Any time we have an outbreak of a disease that we have a safe and effective vaccine against, it should raise a red flag.”

State data shows that 7.9 percent of children in Clark County were exempt in the 2017-2018 school year from vaccines required for kindergarten entry, which includes the two-dose course for measles that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is 97 percent effective.

Only 1.2 percent of the children had a medical dispensation, meaning that nearly 7 percent were not immunized for personal or religious reasons. Nationally, about 2 percent of children went without required immunizations for nonmedical reasons.

The high rate of nonmedical exemption for vaccines is what makes the Portland area, which sits across the Columbia River from Clark County, a “hotspot” for outbreaks, according to Peter J. Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

“This is something I’ve predicted for a while now,” he said of the public health emergency in Clark County. “It’s really awful and really tragic and totally preventable.”

Of the confirmed cases, 18 patients are between the ages of 1 to 10 years old.

Twenty of the infected individuals had not been immunized against measles, and the vaccination history of the other three remained unverified. One person was hospitalized.

Experts advised that the outbreak could still be in its infancy. The incubation period of the virus averages two weeks, and it can be spread four days before a rash makes…

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