The measles outbreak in Texas does not slow down. Vaccination could change: nPR

Signs show the way to measles tests in the parking lot of the Seminole Hospital District opposite the Wigwam Stadium on February 27, 2025 in Seminole, Texas.

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The non -slip vaccination rates in West texas have led to the largest measles outbreak in the state for over 30 years, with more than 500 patients affected from April 8 and spreading cases to New Mexico and Oklahoma. Last week, a non -vaccinated Texan child died of measles and marked the third death associated with the outbreak.

Experts in public health say that there is a game book to slow outbreaks like this: identify cases. Isolation patient. Follow where you were and who you may have exposed. Especially increase the vaccination rate.

“This is the way to stop it. This only ends with immunity,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center of the Brown University School of Public Health.

This strategy is not new. The advantages of measles vaccination have been well established for more than half a century. The development of the vaccine in the 1960s meant that parents had to accept the risk of serious complications or deaths that were associated with the common illness of childhood.

Until 2000, measles in the USA was considered eliminated – thanks to the vaccination. But misinformation about the vaccine began to spread Around the same time.

Katherine Wells, Director of Public Health in Lubbock, the largest city in the West Texas region, which is affected by the outbreak, said that she had determined the effects of this misinformation today.

“With the community you really stopped vaccinating about what has seen in the USA about 20 years ago,” she said.

According to this, the vaccine is safe and effective Centers for the control and prevention of diseasesWith rare and usually mild side effects.

However, the US vaccine rates have dropped for everything in the past five years, from measles to flu, so loud CDC data.

In Texas, the immunization rates in the state and in the kindergarten teacher between 2019 and 2023, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, were about two and a half percent.

The same applies at the national level, CDC data Shows.

In Gaines County, the epicenter of the West Texas outbreak, only around 82% of kindergarten teachers were vaccinated for measles in the school year 2023-24 World Health Organization To maintain herdism.

Wells also said that she and her colleagues increased the tests and vaccination efforts in the region with some efforts to success.

Nevertheless, it is a hard battle.

“The recording for vaccines was … definitely a fight. I want to be honest,” said Wells.

She said her department followed by the established measles playbook: implementation of the tracking, inform the public about possible exposure and the promotion of isolation.

If Texas does not explain an emergency for public health, local civil servants cannot take any more aggressive steps, such as preventively among quarantine of unpolished children.

Chris van Deusen, director of media relationships at the Texas Ministry of Health, said there were no plans to explain an emergency.

The secretary for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, arrives in the Reinlander Mennonite Church after a second death of a child on Sunday.

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Contradictory language

During the outbreak, a number of legislative templates that aim to relax from vaccination mandates are taken into account by the Republican -controlled Texas legislation.

And at the national level, the secretary for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sometimes played down the importance of vaccines and promoted unproven alternative treatments for measles.

In the last month published OP-ED, he proposed vitamin A Could “reduce the measles mortality dramatically”.

And while the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends two doses vitamin A to relieve measles symptoms, especially if they are so sick that they have been hospitalized, vitamin A is not a healing and does not prevent the disease.

After a second child in Texas died of measles last weekend, Kennedy said in A Social media statement that he had traveled to visit the child’s family. In the explanation, he said that vaccines are the most effective defense against this disease.

Nuzzo said that contradictory messaging gives the members of the health professions who react to the outbreak on site.

“I think federal communication spoils the water and does the jobs that the local officials have to react harder to this outbreak,” she said.

The proposed federal financing cuts also become an obstacle.

In March, the Efficiency of the Ministry of the Department announced that hundreds of millions of dollars to end grants to the Texas Ministry of Health of the Ministry of State Health.

Van Deusen said that the agency had announced more than 50 local health departments to end the expenditure of funds within the framework of the affected federal prices – some of which were used for immunization programs.

Lacey Nobles, Lubbock’s communication director, said that the city still judges what effects these lost funds will have on site.

Since the confirmed cases exceed 500 in Texas, Wells is felt for a long street.

“This will be a big eruption and we are still on the side where we increase the number of cases,” she said.

You expect it to take a year for the number of case counts to be back to zero.