Again, we hope that’s all there is.
The Houston Health Department has confirmed the city’s third measles case, months after identifying two cases in adults which marked the first measles cases since 2018.
The Houston Health Department Sunday reported an unvaccinated infant had been exposed to measles during international travel, a news release states. The infant was hospitalized and has since been discharged and was recovering at home, it said.
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The recent confirmed case is not connected to the measles outbreak in West Texas and is not related to the cases confirmed in January, the release states. Since the outbreak, one child has died from measles after being hospitalized in Lubbock.
The first two Houston cases were from January. As hoped, there was no further spread. We can hope for more of the same this time. The Houston Landing has some more information about the affected family, who had been exposed to the measles while travelling internationally. Cases are up in many countries around the world in addition to the US.
And then there was this over the weekend:
On Wednesday, a woman gave birth in a Lubbock, Texas, hospital in the middle of a deadly and fast-growing measles outbreak. Doctors didn’t realize until the young mother had been admitted and in labor that she was infected with the measles.
By that time, other new moms, newborns and their families at University Medical Center Children’s Hospital in Lubbock had unknowingly been exposed to the virus, considered one of the most contagious in the world.
Hospital staff are scrambling with damage control efforts — implementing emergency masking policies and giving babies as young as three days old injections of immunoglobulin, an antibody that helps their fragile immune system fight off infections.
A 2021 study found that the therapy is highly effective in protecting exposed newborns from getting sick.
“These babies didn’t ask for this exposure,” said Chad Curry, training chief for the University Medical Center EMS. “But at the end of the day, this is the only way we can protect them.”
Neither Curry nor UMC representatives could give an exact number of exposed newborns.
It’s unclear when the woman tested positive for measles. Public health officials are casting a wide net in an effort to contact everyone who may have been exposed to this particular patient. Viral particles can live in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours.
We’ll just have to see what effect that has. All my sympathies to the public health officials in Lubbock now dealing with this.
Those stories were from before Tuesday, when we got the latest case numbers.
Texas Department of State Health Services reported Tuesday that the state has now seen 279 measles cases amid the outbreak, an increase of 20 since the agency’s last update on Friday. New Mexico health officials reported 38 cases as of Tuesday morning.
In Texas, 36 people have been hospitalized amid the outbreak, which is still centered in the South Plains region, according to DSHS data. One school-aged child has died, the first measles death in the United States since 2015. New Mexico has reported two hospitalizations and one death, an unvaccinated adult.
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More than two-thirds of cases have been in Gaines County, a small county along the New Mexico border. But there have been some cases in the Panhandle and as far as Lamar County, located northeast of Dallas along the Oklahoma border.
Gaines County remains the epicenter of the outbreak and reported 17 new cases on Tuesday. The county has reported a total of 191 cases amid the outbreak, according to DSHS data.
Cochran, Lamar and Lubbock counties each reported one new case. Cochran County has now reported a total of seven cases amid the outbreak, while Lamar and Lubbock counties have each reported five.
No new infections which reported in the other seven counties that have seen cases amid the outbreak. Of those seven counties, Terry County has seen the most cases with 36.
Of the 279 cases, 88 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 120 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17.
Only two cases have been seen in people who received at least one dose of the MMR vaccine prior to an infection.
Per the DMN, Oklahoma is still reporting four cases, same as their initial report. This is a slightly smaller bump than we’ve been getting, but it’s just a half-week’s worth of data, and there’s no particular reason to think things are slowing down. If the next three or four reports show a tapering off, then we’ll have something.
And once again, we must remind you, measles is bad.
Dr. Alex Cvijanovich has been a practicing pediatrician for more than 20 years. She says she’s still haunted by the memory of a teenage boy she treated at the start of her career in Utah.
The boy had contracted measles as a 7-month-old, when he was too young to be vaccinated. “He got the virus from a child in his neighborhood who was unvaccinated,” says Cvijanovich, who now practices in New Mexico.
It was a relatively mild case of measles, and the infant recovered. She says he grew up to be a healthy, bright kid — an honor student.
Then in middle school, he started to develop troubling symptoms. “He started getting lost between classes, lost like he couldn’t find what class to go to next,” Cvijanovich says.
Worried, the teen’s parents took him to a series of doctors to figure out what was wrong, until a pediatric neurologist finally suspected a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE. It’s a degenerative neurological condition that typically develops seven to 10 years after a measles infection. It is almost always fatal. Cvijanovich was part of the hospital team that confirmed the diagnosis.
“The problem is that there is no treatment for it,” she says. “And he basically became more and more incapacitated over time.”
Some 18 months after his initial diagnosis, she says, the teenager died.
SSPE was once considered quite rare. But Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City who wrote a history of measles, says data from outbreaks in the U.S. over the past several decades suggests that may not always be the case.
“It turns out that in some age groups, especially in kids under about age 2, it’s much more common than we thought,” Ratner says.
For example, a review of measles cases in California found that, between 1988 and 1991, SSPE cases occurred as frequently as 1 in every 1,367 cases in unvaccinated children under age 5. Another study that looked at U.S. outbreaks between 1989 and 1991 put the rate of SSPE at roughly 1 out of every 4,600 measles cases.
Vaccination prevents not just SSPE, but also other serious complications that measles can cause — including pneumonia and severe brain swelling.
Those are long odds, to be sure. But how much do you want to increase the risk of death to your child? And note that in this case, the victim was someone who had been too young to get vaccinated, who was infected by someone who was unvaccinated by choice. How would you like to feel responsible for that? ABC News has more.