Week 4 Health Issue Measle Outbreak

Week 4: Measles Outbreak

Jan. 23, 2015, health officials are reported the number of people infected with measles linked to the outbreak at Disney World in California increased to78 individuals’ .The United States declared measles eliminated from the country in 2000. This meant the disease was no longer native to the United States. The country was able to eliminate measles because of effective vaccination programs and a strong public health system for detecting and responding to measles cases and outbreaks, according to the CDC. A big contributing factor to the parents' continuing concerns about vaccine safety was a 1998 fraudulent paper published and later retracted in the medical journal The Lancet. The study falsely suggested a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism. The lead author of that paper, Andrew Wakefield, has since lost his medical license for having falsified his data.

 “Science is at once the most questioning and . . . sceptical of activities and also the most trusting,” said Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1989. “It is intensely skeptical about the possibility of error, but totally trusting about the possibility of fraud.” Never has this been truer than of the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a “new syndrome” of autism and bowel disease. 

Measles are not only a threat to children, but adults as well. Measles in adults may result in severe, life-threatening complications that utilize substantial medical resources. Physicians need to appreciate the clinical presentations and manifestations of severe measles in adults and to provide measles vaccine to nonimmune adults during community-wide outbreaks. .

Regarding Interventions aimed at communities to inform and/or educate about early childhood vaccination. A recent study objective was to assess the effects of interventions aimed at communities to inform and/or educate people about vaccination in children six years and younger. This review provides limited evidence that interventions aimed at communities to inform and educate about early childhood vaccination may improve attitudes towards vaccination and probably increase vaccination uptake under some circumstances.

 In understanding the main barriers to immunizations the arts used in media were one of the strategies Columbia tailored the importance to immunization through colorful flyers, banners and posters.

Russell D. Wong, Matthew Bidwell Goetz, Glenn Mathisen, Daniel Henry, The American Journal of Medicine, Volume 95, Issue 4, October 1993, Pages 377-383

Expanded Program on Immunization, Carrera 13 No. 32-76, Bogotá, Colombia
Comprehensive Family Immunization Unit, Pan American Health Organization, 525 23rd St., NW Washington, DC 20037, USA 

BMC Public Health 2014, 14:669, Understanding the Barriers to Immunization in Columbia, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/14/669

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

 Saeterdal I¹, Lewin S, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Glenton C, Munabi-Babigumira S. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2014 Nov 19;11:CD010232. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD010232.pub2

Pediatrics; Associated Press; Los Angeles Times

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