The woman was hospitalised for several health conditions in the spring at a facility in Clallam County, which covers the northern part of the Olympic Peninsula. The health officials are also withholding information regarding whether or not the woman had received her vaccination, although they did mention that she had a compromised immune system for a different reason. Drugs such as those also suppress immune protection to measles from vaccination or from having had the disease.
Advertisement
Anti-vaccine activists, spurred by widely-discredited claims that vaccines against measles and other diseases can cause autism or other illnesses, have vigorously protested against such mandates. Any one case of measles can infect on average 18 other unvaccinated/unprotected people; the equivalent number for HIV is 4, and for Ebola is 2. It’s important to vaccinate, she believes. She said the best protection was immunisation. Moyer said measles is highly communicable and when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs, it spreads. Instead, she developed pneumonia.
The woman’s atypical measles symptoms, along with the tendency for doctors to have not seen measles before, is nearly “a recipe for missing a diagnosis”, Adalja said. She died of pneumonia this spring, and it was during her autopsy that doctors determined that her pneumonia was due to measles.
The case wasn’t related to a recent measles outbreak that started at Disneyland and triggered a national debate about vaccinations, according to the Washington State Department of Health.
I asked Dr. Thankfully, there have been no new measles cases reported in Washington State since April, though as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention point out, that there have now been 178 cases of the disease in the U.S.so far this year, after a record 668 cases in 2014.
“Measles can be serious, even deadly, and in this case it was”, she said by phone.
“This tragic situation illustrates the importance of immunizing as many people as possible to provide a high level of community protection against measles”. “While measles can be deadly in anybody, it is more likely to cause this kind of complication in people with immune-suppressing conditions”. Those in the US who remain opposed to vaccinations include some religious communities, families practicing alternative medicine and libertarians who shun government interference.
Advertisement
The last USA death from measles was in 2003. The woman’s compromised immune system could explain why she had measles but not its characteristic rash, he said. (And, most of the time, older people whose immune systems are decaying-but not in the case of measles, because anyone born before 1957, when measles was common, has natural immunity to the disease.). Last year, 644 people contracted the virus, despite the virus being declared eradicated from the United States in 2000.
