Measles: Breakouts and Breakthroughs

Extract

The numerous outbreaks of measles, in both the United States and other countries, are shocking to people my age, because we remember how severe ordinary measles could be, we remember cases of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis years after measles, and we remember when, a few years ago, measles seemed to be disappearing because of vaccination [1–5]. Moreover, the ability of measles to depress immune responses to other pathogens was established recently; vaccination confers a protective effect against other infections, which underlines the crucial importance of vaccination in poor countries where such infections result in a high mortality rate [6, 7].

The reasons for the recrudescence of measles in high-income countries are easy to identify; they include importation from other countries and failure of parents to give their children protection against measles in the form of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Indeed, it is clear that measles would disappear again if antivaccination ideas (so-called vaccine hesitancy) disappeared, but that does not seem likely to happen when people such as Andrew Wakefield and Robert Kennedy are still campaigning against vaccination.