Tag: measles

“Measles Mayhem”: Where is this going?

The headlines are full of measles at the moment, in the way that always reeks of coordination.

The measles outbreak in the US has been simmering away for weeks, but was brought back to the front burner in the last few days. The Daily Mail headlining:

America on verge of measles MAYHEM: Hundreds feared to be infected in California and Arizona outbreaks as US suffers year’s worth of cases in two months

It’s not just Arizona and California either. Chicago, Florida and Philadelphia all have “outbreaks” of their own.

An article in the Atlantic headlined “The Return of Measles”, claims there have been measles outbreaks in 19 separate states.

Meanwhile, on our side of the pond, a measles outbreak that started in Birmingham in January has apparently spread north and south. The UK’s total cases are apparently up to ~733.

In Ireland, the scary story is that one person on a flight from Abu Dhabi to Dublin tested positive for measles a couple of days ago. That number has since risen to three! The authorities are desperately hunting down anyone who was on that plane.

That’s three measles scare-stories in three different countries at the same time, with maybe more on the way

To quote Ian Fleming, “once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence and three times is enemy action”.

So what is this “enemy action”? Where is this story going?

First, let’s get this out of the way: This is not a public health scare. Not a real one. Measles is not especially dangerous, with a reported case fatality ratio of about 0.02% in Western countries, meaning for every 5000 people who get measles 4999 will survive.

So what’s with the scary headlines? What’s the endgame here?

To answer that we need to ask “who are the media are blaming?”, and as with most issues these days there are two answers to that.

Yes, it’s another binary.

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Surprising Remedies for Measles Might Have Saved Many Lives

As newly emerging cases of measles have been reported in the United States, and Europe is also facing an outbreak, health authorities worldwide are calling for vaccination, drawing attention to this old but still unresolved contagious disease.

However, when measles swept the world in the last century, it was not a vaccine that saved millions of lives.

An Old, Severe Illness

Almost all children contracted measles in the first half of the 20th century.

Prior to the 1960s, an estimated 30 million cases and 2.6 million deaths due to measles occurred annually worldwide.

Young children have been the most affected, as seen in 1906 when 85 percent of reported deaths were children under age 5. From 1912 to 1922, an average of 6,000 measles-related deaths in the United States were reported each year.

Although measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000, new cases have emerged during the past decades. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented 1,274 cases in 31 states in 2019, reaching a peak in cases during the last decade.

Despite massive global vaccination in the current era, in 2015 alone, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported around 134,200 deaths attributed to measles.

Similar to SARS-CoV-2

Dating back to the 9th century, the Persian physician Abū Bakr Muhammad Zakariyyā Rāzī (Rhazes) documented measles. In 1757, Scottish doctor Francis Home determined that measles was caused by an infectious agent, marking a significant advancement in understanding the disease.

Soley found in humans, the measles virus is a negative-strand RNA virus, similar to SARS-CoV-2, meaning that the genetic material of both viruses needs to be “flipped” before functioning.

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