When measles rampaged through my childhood home in 1960, it turned out to be a fatal event.
Very thankfully, not for me (you figured: Right, since I’m typing this in 2024!) or any of my four siblings.
But in that still-unvaccinated world, we in the range from infancy through age 8 were statistically vulnerable. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 450 Americans, most of them previously healthy children, died that year because of measles.
In those days, between 3 million and 4 million Americans were infected annually, leading to an average of 48,000 hospitalizations. Pneumonia was a common complication, and sometimes encephalitis (about 1,000 cases a year), blindness and deafness. Ear infections happened often, as well as severe diarrhea and dehydration.
Then, and still today, the disease is most dangerous for children under 5, adults over 20, people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women, who are at risk of premature delivery and babies with low birth weights.
The Eades kids did not have to go to the hospital, or even the doctor. My mother put us to bed in darkened rooms (our eyes were sensitive to light, per the virus) and she nursed us through a week of fever, coughing and an uncomfortable red rash.
She also tried to keep us entertained.
For me, that meant I got to play with an iridescent glass candy bowl that was normally kept out of reach. Of course, I dropped it and cried when it shattered on the linoleum floor of my bedroom.
Next, she gave me a cardboard box containing several Easter chicks to play with. I was thrilled to cuddle all that fuzzy yellow cuteness, but must have overdone it. When the chicks died (the fatalities referenced above), my mother said they’d had too much “wooling.”
I hope I cried about that, too, but I don’t recall.
A better world was coming. A measles vaccine was developed in 1963, followed by another for mumps in 1967 and yet another for rubella (known as German measles) in 1969. In 1971, the three were rolled into the MMR vaccine, to be given in two doses – at about age 1 and a second before a child enters kindergarten.
The vaccine brought a dramatic reduction in all three diseases and their too-often nasty consequences. Specifically, for measles, increasingly fewer hospitalizations and deaths culminated in a 2000 declaration by public health officials that America had eradicated measles within our borders.
It wouldn’t last, however, because much of the rest of the world fell below the 95 percent vaccination rate believed to be needed for herd immunity. International travel meant measles would keep revisiting America, although lacking the ferocity of the bad old days.
The worst year in recent memory occurred in 2019, with 1,274 American cases across 31 states. Disease detectives blamed global infection that traveled here and then targeted under-vaccinated communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic delivered good and bad outcomes regarding measles. Our isolation behaviors in 2020 cut reported American cases to only 13.
But here and around the world, health officials estimated 61 million doses of vaccines were delayed or skipped, setting up global dangers that are playing out in present day.
On March 6, U.S. News and World Report cited 2022 data showing more than 9 million measles cases worldwide, an 18 percent increase over 2021, and 136,000 deaths, a 43 percent spike.
That’s tragic for the citizens of the world, and not great for America, either, since we will always be vulnerable to global transmission. As of April 4, the CDC reported 113 American cases of measles (across 17 states, including Missouri) in the first three months of 2024, well above the 58 cases reported in all of 2023.
The numbers in 2024 don’t compare to the millions who contracted measles when I was a kid, but no sane person would want to return to that scenario. Depressingly, however, U.S. measles vaccination levels are the lowest in a decade.
A March 21 press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services reported that statewide, the MMR vaccination rate among kindergarteners has dropped steadily from 95.4 percent in the 2016-2017 school year to 90.5 percent at the start of the 2023-2024 school year, with religious (non-medical) exemptions increasing in that same period from 1.9 percent to 3.5 percent.
Jefferson County beats the statewide average, according to the county Health Department, with a 92.67 percent measles vaccination rate, but we remain below the 95 percent recommended threshold.
Parents want to do what’s best for their kids and, in that mindset, some are choosing to opt out of vaccinations, citing a long list of concerns.
I’m not a doctor, but here’s my prescription for those who are holding back: Please do some open-minded research. Review sources on all sides of the issue, weigh the risks, and come to a decision based not only on what is good for your child, but what is good for the other children in your neighborhood, town, state, country and world.
The CDC says the last American death from measles occurred in 2015. My hope is that we’ll all do our part to make that date stand.