Maryn McKenna

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Ebola Could Cause Thousands More Deaths — By Ushering In Measles

March 15, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Women gather in the Guinean village of Meliandou, believed to be Ebola's ground zero.

Women gather in the Guinean village of Meliandou, believed to be Ebola’s ground zero. Jerome Delay/AP

Awareness of Ebola is picking up again in the United States: An American volunteer who was working in Sierra Leone has contracted Ebola and been medevac’d to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center for Ebola treatment, and 10 more volunteers have been brought back to NIH, Omaha and Atlanta, to be examined at three of the four institutions in the US that have safe units to house them.

It’s a reminder that Ebola still persists in West Africa: In the last period the World Health Organization reported on (the 7 days ending March 8), there were 116 new cases. One bit of good news: None of them were in Liberia, for the second week in a row. But Guinea and Sierra Leone, where this volunteer was infected, continue to struggle.

And in a research paper published as that volunteer was being flown back, there’s a reminder that the Ebola outbreak is creating layers of health risks for those countries. In Science , researchers from NIH and four universities warn that Ebola’s interruption of other health services, such as childhood immunizations, threatens to create secondary epidemics of preventable diseases that would dwarf Ebola’s impact. In particular, they warn that there could be 100,000 additional measles cases, and up to 16,000 additional deaths, if health services are not restored.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Ebola, measles, Who

Holiday Travel? Get Vaccinated First, or Bring Home Something Unexpected

December 24, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Angelo DeSantis (CC), Flickr

Angelo DeSantis (CC), Flickr

Happy holidays, constant readers. If you’re like many people, you may be preparing to take a trip, maybe for a break from winter, maybe just to see family. As you’re getting ready, making sure to decant the toiletries and pack the presents unwrapped, here’s one thing not to forget: your vaccinations.

Really, this is important. Last January, according to an account recently published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four unvaccinated people were infected with measles by a never-found fifth person during a single 4-hour window at an airport gate somewhere in the US.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Airport, CDC, measles

Measles Cases Triple in U.S., Vaccine Refusal Here and Elsewhere to Blame

December 6, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Teseum (CC), Flickr

Measles, one of the most communicable of all infectious diseases, is spiking in the United States, with three times as many cases as usual this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The spike is due to both foreign importations — infected travelers coming from places where measles is not under control — and local vulnerability: unvaccinated children and adults in the United States.

In a press briefing, the CDC’s director Dr. Thomas Frieden said that from January to November, there were 175 known cases of measles in the US, with 20 of those people having to be hospitalized. The agency would expect to see about 60 cases, he said. Those cases came from 52 separate travelers. Most of the time, the imported virus found only a few people to infect — but nine times, the imports caused large outbreaks, always in people who had not received the vaccine.

“It is not a failure of the vaccine,” Frieden said. “It’s a failure to vaccinate. Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, measles, Science Blogs, vaccination

What Vaccine Refusal Really Costs: Measles in Arizona

April 29, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Every once in a while, there’s news of a measles outbreak. On the surface, they don’t involve large numbers of cases — there’s one in Minneapolis right now that has racked up 21 cases so far — and so people seem to wonder why these outbreaks are such a big deal.

Here’s one reason why: Measles transmission within the US stopped in 2000 because of vaccination. Outbreaks here start with an importation from somewhere else where the disease still flourishes — but they gain a foothold because lack of vaccination, primarily from vaccine refusal, lets the disease get past what should be an impregnable barrier of herd immunity to attack those who are too young to be vaccinated or whose immunity has faded.

Here’s another reason: Stopping the measles virus before it can cause serious disease — and by “serious,” I mean deafness, pneumonia, encephalitis and miscarriage — is incredibly costly and labor-intensive. An account published overnight in the Journal of Infectious Diseases gives a glimpse at just how costly. To stop a 14-person outbreak that began with one unvaccinated tourist visiting a US emergency room, the Arizona Department of Health had to track down and interview 8,321 people; seven Tucson hospitals had to furlough staff members for a combined 15,120 work-hours; and two hospitals where patients were admitted spent $799,136 to contain the disease.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: measles, Science Blogs, vaccines

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