According to the CDC, U.S. measles cases for this year are triple the normal annual average.
The CDC released the numbers onfirming that 172 of the 175 U.S. cases this year involved patients who were infected overseas or caught the disease from someone who had traveled internationally, with 20 cases requiring hospitalization, according to the CDC’s director, Thomas Frieden.
Frieden confirmed that of the cases in the U.S. this year, more than 98 percent of the patients were unvaccinated. “This isn’t the failure of a vaccine; it’s the failure to vaccinate,” he said.
Many parents are reluctant to have their children vaccinated after reports that the MMR vaccination was a cause for autism in children. However, in 2011, pbs.org, released an article stating that the study that linked the vaccine and autism was “fraudulent” and that the doctor behind the study, Andrew Wakefield, had his medical license revoked following the release of the study on 22 children.
The states with the largest number of outbreaks have been Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Earlier this year, the CDC linked 58 of the measles cases in Brooklyn, N.Y., to an unvaccinated 17-year-old who had traveled to London and 23 cases in North Carolina were tied to an unvaccinated resident who contracted the disease while on a three-month family trip to India.
This rise in measle cases comes 50 years after the approval of an extremely effective vaccine against measles, one of the world’s most contagious diseases. The virus still poses a threat to domestic and global health security.
