Gotta say I think you are overstating the problem especially with hospitalization.
Yes, if you are not immunized then you are at risk. The main “at risk” are infants or very young who have not been immunized or the elderly with immune problems. Neither of which come into the “school venue” on a regular basis and is easily avoided.
Measles have been around for a very long time. And I’m glad my kids were able to avoid it with vaccines. But the majority of people my age got it and admittedly suffered through the experience. But after a long week we’re here to tell the tale without hospitalization.
One in five of the unvaccinated may require hospitalization.
I know, I was shocked at that hospitalization rate of 42% in Ohio. In the 1991 Philly outbreak, 9 children died, but there was no hospitalization rate cited, since most of the infected children were in a church that eschewed medical care. The children either got through it, or they died at home.
My point is that this may not be our early 1960s measles. From the CDC website:
" In the decade before 1963 when a vaccine became available, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age. It is estimated 3 to 4 million people in the United States were infected each year. Also each year, among reported cases, an estimated 400 to 500 people died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 1,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain) from measles."
We now have a population of about 3 million children who are unimmunized (and that’s not counting the people over 18 whose parents were early anti-vaxxers). Up until now, they’ve largely been protected by herd immunity and MANDATED quarantine. Herd immunity has dropped to about 90-93%, with the unimmunized often clustering together, and now the other defense, mandated quarantine, appears to be going, too. Even if only one in ten unvaccinated were to require hospitalization, if we don’t limit the spread by mandating that the exposed unimmunized quarantine, that many measles patients requiring hospitalization would overwhelm our pediatric hospitals.
States CAN, but Florida isn’t (although the school where the outbreak is could ban all visitors from the building). Have any of the other 14 states with outbreaks put a mandatory quarantine into effect?
Good question - is Florida’s refusal to mandate that exposed unimmunized stay home outside of the ordinary right now? Certainly it was, before Covid, but what is happening right now, what with measles going on in some 15 states? Most public schools have a policy that all children not immunized against a particular disease must stay out of school if that disease is present in the community or the school. I believe that every state other than FL is requiring that unimmunized children who were actually exposed to measles must stay out of school for 21 days, only because Florida’s surgeon general’s failure to follow the norm was so shockingly newsworthy. Imposed early, it would only affect the 33 unimmunized children in that one Florida elementary school, and likely would have stopped the outbreak. We’ll see what the result of not imposing the quarantine there will be.
In 1987, I was only a couple of months pregnant…not measles but tuberculosis. A parent has been exposed. My principal would not even let me greet the arriving first day students. She told me to go to my room, and stay there, and see my students, and leave the school.
Note, the parent didn’t have TB, just was exposed. But this principal was ultra cautious.
In our school, as an example, if anyone was diagnosed with fifths disease, all pregnant women were sent home immediately. That is still protocol for this.
A kind reminder that this thread is about quarantining after measles exposure. It is not about TB or Fifths Disease or whatever else. Please keep it on topic. Thanks for your understanding.
And if anyone wants to discuss vaccinations in general, there is a thread in the Politics Forum. Please take it there.
I did search for that but found nothing that required it, or the 21 days (did find that children WITH measles needed to be out of school for 5 days).
When my daughter was young, one of her vaccinations (chickenpox maybe?) was missing on the school vaccination chart. The volunteer who called me said she was sure D had had it because she’d had all the other ones and my other daughter had the missing shot, but that is was okay because at that time Colorado allowed parents to opt out of vaccination. But, she told me, if there was an outbreak D would have to remain home until I could prove she was vaccinated. I took the chance. I knew she’d been vaccinated (often double), and if it was chickenpox, I think she’d actually had them before I adopted her.
So yes, school do have rules about the unvaccinated to stay home if there is an outbreak.
Reposting because I think my previous post was removed because I accidentally linked it to a flagged post.
Ah. Well, I absolutely agree that the Florida Surgeon General is in the wrong, but that was definitely an over-reaction in 1987. People with positive TB tests can’t spread it unless they have an active case. People who were just exposed to them certainly can’t. And even then, it takes much stronger exposure than a casual passing or being in the same room.
But the 1980s were the AIDS panic decade, when kids with AIDS were sometimes banned from schools, and the over-reaction spread to TB and other infectious diseases, too. There was a school in NJ where a young girl HIV+ sat in a classroom alone because none of the families would send their kids to school.
And again, this has nothing to do with the idiocy in FL, and their mishandling of measles, which, like Covid, IS spread through casual contact, or even no contact at all. But I still remember, for personal reasons, the AIDS/TB panics of the eighties.
Measles is incredibly contagious. It lingers, infectious, in the air for as much as two hours after someone has walked through an area. A person is infectious for 4 days before and 4 days after the rash appears. It can kill via viral pneumonia, encephalitis, and even a decade later, via subsclerosing panencephalitis. With all our vulnerable unimmunized, an epidemic of it has the potential to overwhelm our pediatric hospital system. For those who refuse to immunize their children, the only way to keep the rest of the population safe is to quarantine those unimmunized with known exposure.
Erroneous, terrified overreactions to other infectious agents has nothing to do with measles. Our CDC’s abysmal failure in its early mishandling of the Covid pandemic has nothing to do with measles. Medically sanctioned 18th century bleeding with leeches has nothing to do with measles.
We are not yet at the point where the general population needs to be concerned about their too young to be immunized infants, nor do the imunosuppressed (especially those on b cell depleting agents, like rituximab). But we could be, within a month, if this spreads outside of the small clusters, if the unimmunized exposed persons are allowed to circulate in public areas, such as churches, schools, supermarkets, which is exactly what Florida is doing currently.
I am in the age group that got their immunity by actually getting measles. There were no measles vaccines when I was a kid. I was 7 when I got it and can remember the red blots all over my body. Back then measles was seen as a rite of passage for children. Does anyone know the hospitalization, and death, rates back in the 1950’s?
Blockquote During the 1950s an annual average of greater than 500,000 cases of measles and nearly 500 deaths due to measles were reported in the United States. Impact of measles in the United States - PubMed
Some people may suffer from severe complications, such as pneumonia (infection of the lungs) and encephalitis (swelling of the brain). They may need to be hospitalized and could die.
Encephalitis. About 1 child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability.
I actually know someone who is deaf from a case of measles at age 3 (prior to vaccinations). Not completely deaf, but enough to make life very difficult.
