Thread: Over 1,000 In Arizona Are Watched For Measles

Over 1,000 In Arizona Are Watched For Measles

By JULIE TURKEWITZ JAN. 29, 2015

DENVER — Arizona health officials on Thursday were tracking more than 1,000 people, including at least 195 children, who might have been exposed to measles as part of an outbreak that began at Disneyland in Southern California and has grown to 67 cases in seven states.

Arizona has seven confirmed cases of measles, and officials in three counties in the Phoenix area — Maricopa, Gila and Pinal — are asking residents who have not been vaccinated and who might have been exposed to stay home from school, work or day care for 21 days.

The announcement comes as thousands of people are arriving in Phoenix for the Super Bowl on Sunday.

“This is a critical point in this outbreak,” the state health director, Will Humble, wrote on his blog. Any missed cases, he wrote, could cause “a long and protracted outbreak.”

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In a conference call with reporters, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official advised anyone with symptoms not to attend the Super Bowl. “The very large outbreaks we’ve seen around the world often started with a small number of cases,” said the official, Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Have You Decided Not to Vaccinate Your Children? Tell Us About Your Experience

New York Times journalists would like to hear from parents, particularly those in California and Arizona, who have chosen not to vaccinate their children against measles and other diseases.



Health officials said that one of Arizona’s cases involved a woman who had recently walked into a Maricopa County pediatric clinic, potentially exposing about 200 children. She had been in contact with a family that had traveled to Disneyland, but she did not know then that she had the disease.

Measles is a viral illness that spreads easily through coughing and sneezing. Before vaccinations became common in 1963, about three million to four million Americans contracted it each year, according to the C.D.C., and about 400 to 500 died from it.

Besides Arizona, the recent California outbreak has spread to Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah and Washington, as well as to Mexico. Health officials are concerned that opposition to childhood vaccinations has prompted a resurgence of an illness that the country believed it had eliminated in 2000.

California has 79 confirmed cases of measles, some not related to the Disneyland outbreak.

Arizona requires children to be vaccinated for measles and other diseases before attending school, unless a parent files for an exemption citing personal beliefs. There has been a rise in the number of parents choosing not to vaccinate: In 2004, 1.6 percent of kindergartners in Arizona were not vaccinated; by 2013, that number was 4.7 percent.

“It allows the disease to get into those areas and really establish a foothold, and once it establishes a foothold, it’s very, very difficult to control,” said Dr. Cara Christ, the state’s chief medical officer.

Five of the seven measles cases in Arizona are in Kearny, a copper mining town of about 2,000 residents. Four of those cases are from a family that recently visited Disneyland.

Residents have begun keeping young children at home after school, Mayor Sam Hosler said. And local establishments have posted notices advising passers-by of the time and date when measles-infected people passed through.

“We were lucky,” said Rich Walker, a manager at Kearny Health Mart Pharmacy, which had a visit Jan. 22 from a man later found to have the illness. All of his colleagues, he said, had been vaccinated, and few customers were in the store at the time.

In Maricopa County, three clinics have had a surge in visitors requesting measles vaccinations for their children, according to health officials, who reported a 50 percent rise in vaccination requests over last year.

The clinics have added nurses, and lines have begun to form.

One visitor was a parent from Mesa who had two children, ages 12 and 14, who had not received measles vaccinations.

“If you’re trying to make lemonade out of the situation,” said Jeanene Fowler, a spokeswoman for the county health department, “that’s the best we can ask for.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/us...osed.html?_r=0