It was not revealed by officials whether the woman received vaccinations; however, they said that she was having a compromised immune system.
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A young woman from the state of Washington has become the first person in the country to die from measles in a dozen years. Officials said it was a different strain.
“Washington Health Department spokesman Donn Moyer says the Washington woman lacked some of the measles’ common symptoms, such as a rash, so the infection wasn’t discovered until an autopsy”. Public health officials recommend that everyone who is eligible for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine get vaccinated so they can help protect themselves, their families, and the vulnerable people in their community. No deaths resulted from that outbreak. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted last week, while investigating a case in which someone was infected just by walking through a gate at an airport, measles is extremely contagious. For further news about this case, a good person to follow will be JoNel Aleccia, the excellent health reporter at the Seattle Times. She said the best protection was immunisation.
“We know that even when measles is endemic”, Dr. Mark Schleiss, professor of pediatrics and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at the University of Minnesota, told Forbes, “we can prevent deaths through immunization”. Herd immunity protects people with weakened immune systems and people whose vaccines did not take. “That is the bottom line”, she said. “The woman had several other health conditions and was on medications that contributed to a suppressed immune system. Since more than three weeks has already passed since the last active measles case, no one who had contact with one of the known cases is any longer at risk for developing measles from those exposures”, it said. The woman was likely exposed during a recent outbreak in the state, they say.
The woman, who died in the spring, was most likely to have been exposed to the virus in a health facility in Washington state during an outbreak there, according to The Washington Post. She died of pneumonia this spring, and it was during her autopsy that doctors determined that her pneumonia was due to measles.
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People with compromised immune systems are more susceptible to infections. Drugs such as those also suppress immune protection to measles from vaccination or from having had the disease.
