The Texas count tops 250 and keeps on climbing.
The measles outbreak that began in the South Plains region of Texas grew to 259 cases and spread to two more counties on Friday, health officials said.
The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services includes 36 new cases since the agency’s last update on Tuesday. Infections have mostly been seen in children who have not received the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
Thirty-four people have been hospitalized amid the outbreak and one school-aged child has died from measles, the DSHS said. One death has also been reported in New Mexico, which reported 35 measles cases as of Friday morning.
Two Texas counties reported their first cases amid the outbreak, bringing the total number of affected counties to 11. Cochran County, in northwest Texas, reported six cases on Friday. Lamar County, located northeast of Dallas along the border with Oklahoma, reported four cases.
[…]
Gaines County remains the epicenter of the outbreak, adding 18 new cases on Friday. The small county along the New Mexico border has now reported 174 cases in total, about two-thirds of all cases in the outbreak.
Nearby Terry County reported four new cases, bringing its total to 36.
Dallam, Dawson, Lubbock and Yoakum counties each reported one new case. Dallam County has now seen six cases, Dawson has seen 11, Lubbock has seen four and Yoakum has seen 11.
No new infections were reported in Martin County, which has seen three cases, or in Ector or Lynn counties, which have each seen two.
Of the 259 cases, 86 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 115 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17.
Only two cases have been seen in people that have received two or more doses of the MMR vaccine; the other 257 have been in people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
Prior DSHS updates said five cases had been in vaccinated individuals. The agency said in Friday’s update that it learned two cases were in individuals who got the MMR vaccine after they had been exposed to the virus.
The third case was a Lubbock County resident who was believed to have measles, but actually had a reaction to the vaccine, the DSHS said. That suspected case has been removed from the case count, the agency said.
The vaccine can cause side effects such as fever or a mild rash, but those reactions are typically mild and resolve in a few days, according to the CDC.
The Tuesday count was 223, so that’s 36 more in three days’ time. Up, up, and away. The fact that Lamar County now has four cases is scary, because it’s a long damn way away from the New Mexico border. Maybe they’ll turn out to be unrelated, but still. The potential for breakouts all over the state is sobering.
And as noted, Oklahoma is in the house.
On Tuesday, health officials in Oklahoma reported two “probable” cases in the state that appear to be linked to the ongoing outbreak in Texas and New Mexico.
According to the Oklahoma State Department of Health, the two people developed measles symptoms after exposure to cases associated with the Texas and New Mexico outbreaks.
The people isolated immediately after they realized they had been exposed and stayed home throughout the period they were contagious, health officials said.
Looking around, I see some stories linking the Oklahoma cases to Texas and New Mexico, and some saying they’re not part of the CDC’s official tally just yet. So let’s reserve judgment for now.
But we don’t need to reserve judgment about RFK Jr. He’s a dangerous idiot who will get people sick.
In an interview with Fox News that aired Tuesday, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that “people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. And what we need to do is give them the best information and encourage them to vaccinate. The vaccine does stop the spread of the disease.”
But Kennedy also downplayed the safety of the vaccine and wrongly told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that measles outbreaks could be driven in part by people who have waning immunity from the vaccine.
“When you and I were kids, everybody got measles, and measles gave you … lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people, it wanes,” Kennedy told Hannity.
“Some years, we have hundreds of these outbreaks. … And, you know, part of that is that there are people who don’t vaccinate, but also the vaccine itself wanes. The vaccine wanes 4.5% per year,” he said.
But Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says that if that were the case, measles wouldn’t have been declared eliminated in the US in 2000.
There’s some dispute among experts about how much protection may wane, if at all. However, they all agree that in most cases, the vaccine confers lifelong immunity against the virus.
The current outbreak “is absolutely being driven and started by unvaccinated individuals,” said Dr. Michael Mina, chief scientific officer of the telehealth company eMed and an expert in the epidemiology, immunology and spread of infectious disease.
Even those who may have waning immunity will not transmit large amounts of virus, he said.
Levels of antibodies created by the vaccine might decrease over time, but with a virus like measles, its longer incubation period gives the body’s immune memory cells more time to help fight the infection. This enables long-lasting immunity from vaccination, Offit explained.
I mean, you can listen to the people who know what they’re talking about, or you can listen to the badly misinformed roid-riddled moron. You ought to be able to make that choice for yourself. In that spirit, here’s some of that best information for you:
Measles is unlike other childhood viruses that come and go. In severe cases it can cause pneumonia. About 1 in 1,000 patients develops encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, and there are 1 or 2 deaths per 1,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus can wipe out the immune system, a complication called “immune amnesia.”
When we get sick with viruses or bacteria, our immune systems have the ability to form memories that quickly allow them to recognize and respond to the pathogens if they’re encountered again.
Measles targets cells in the body, such as plasma cells and memory cells, that contain those immunologic memories, destroying some of them in the process.
“Nobody escapes this,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a vaccine expert and former professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has led some of the research in the field.
In a 2019 study, Mina and his team found that a measles infection can wreck anywhere from 11% to 73% of a person’s antibody stockpile, depending on how severe the infection. That means that if people had 100 antibodies to chickenpox before they had measles, they may be left with just 50 after measles infections, potentially making them more vulnerable to catching it and getting sicker.
Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology at the Yale School of Medicine, said: “That’s why it’s called amnesia. We forget who the enemies are.”
While virtually everybody who gets infected with measles will have their immune systems weakened, some will be hit harder than others.
“There’s no world in which you get measles and it doesn’t destroy some [immunity],” he said. “The question is does it destroy enough to really make a clinical impact.”
In an earlier study from 2015, Mina estimated that before vaccinations, when measles was common, the virus could have been implicated in as many as half of all childhood deaths from infectious disease, mostly from other diseases such as pneumonia, sepsis, diarrheal diseases and meningitis.
The researchers found that after a measles infection, the immune system can be suppressed almost immediately and remain that way for two to three years.
“Immune amnesia really begins as soon as the virus replicates in those [memory] cells,” Mina said.
Get informed, get vaccinated if you haven’t been before, get boosted if you have any reason to believe you need it. Vitamin A and steroids and antibiotics won’t save you. But you can save yourself.