Editorial written by The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board.
The West Texas measles outbreak has, thankfully, ended. Between late January and earlier this month, more than 760 Texans caught the preventable disease, 99 were hospitalized, and two children died. Measles cases linked to Gaines County cropped up in three other states.
It’s a relief the outbreak is over, but it’s hard to celebrate an event that signals the end of a remarkable public health triumph. The world was on a path to eradicating measles. Now we’re going backward.
What makes the current situation so lamentable is that measles only infects humans. Many viruses, such as influenza or rabies, infect humans and other animals. These viruses are harder to eliminate because they have so many nonhuman “reservoirs” from which they can re-emerge.
Measles is different. If about 95% of the world’s population were fully vaccinated, and that rate was sustained for multiple years, the measles virus would die out. Then no one would need to be immunized against it.
That happened with the variola virus, which causes smallpox. It once killed three out of every 10 people it infected. After a massive international immunization campaign, with a vaccine that used a related, but less harmful, virus to provoke an immune response, smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1980. Americans stopped receiving routine smallpox vaccinations in 1972.
Before measles vaccines were developed, almost everyone in the world contracted the virus by age 15. That resulted in tens of millions of infections, and millions of deaths, each year.
The first measles vaccine was introduced around 1960. As vaccines improved and became widely used, cases dropped. Between 2000-2018, annual reported measles cases declined 59% and measles-related deaths fell by 73%. The global case count hit a low of 132,490 in 2016, according to an article in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Infections began climbing as vaccination rates stagnated or fell. In countries that had eliminated the virus, such as Venezuela and Brazil, measles again became endemic. Misinformation and disinformation also began eroding trust in a vaccine that had been proven, repeatedly, to be safe and effective.
That disinformation often downplays the dangers of measles. There is nothing benign about the rubeola virus. It is not the deadliest pathogen, but it is among the most contagious. And while most patients suffer only a rash and fever, a significant percentage develop complications such as encephalitis, pneumonia and secondary bacterial infections that can cause permanent disabilities, such as hearing loss.
Measles vaccinations and measles infections both confer immunity, but the “natural” infection carries far more risk for individuals and their communities. It’s too soon to know how many Texas measles patients have suffered lasting harm from this outbreak. We just know that almost all of the infections could have been prevented.
