Measles Outbreak Quotes

Your file was empty. Nothing. Not even an immunization record.” He didn’t even pretend to look surprised. He eased back in his seat, eyes gleaming obsidian. “And you’re telling me this because you’re afraid I might cause an outbreak? Measles or mumps?” “I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I know something about you isn’t right. You haven’t fooled everybody. I’m going to find out what you’re up to. I’m going to expose you.” “Looking forward to it.” I flushed, catching the innuendo too late.

Studies show that the fear of public humiliation is a potent force. During the 1988-89 basketball season, for example, two NCAA basketball teams played eleven games without any spectators, owing to a measles outbreak that led their schools to quarantine all students. Both teams played much better (higher free-throw percentages, for example) without any fans, even adoring home-team fans, to unnerve them.

Well, Zimbabwe now has a higher immunization rate for one-year-olds against measles (around 95 percent) than the United States does. So do 112 other countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 37 We are down to a 91 percent vaccination rate for measles, which, according to the WHO, makes us much more vulnerable to outbreaks.

Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval

An outbreak of vaccine-preventable measles that began in Disneyland over winter holidays in 2014 spread into seven states, exposing thousands to the contagion. Between 1996 and 2011, the United States experienced fifteen such outbreaks.17

Almost two years after the outbreak in Philadelphia subsides, CDC investigators submit their final report. The Faith Tabernacle Congregation and the First-Century Gospel Church were at the center of an outbreak in Philadelphia that affected more than 1,400 people. Among church members, 486 people were infected and six were killed by measles. Among non-church members, 938 people were infected and three were killed. All nine fatalities were children. Because they hadn’t been vaccinated, the attack rate among church members was a thousand times higher than that in the surrounding community.

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

Whatever their place of origin, diseases came in waves, one after the other, with deadly results. Smallpox, the most lethal, killed up to 90% of infected peoples during epidemics in the 1770s, 1800–1801, 1838 and 1862–1803.94 Malaria took a comparable death toll along the lower Columbia and Willamette Valley in 1830–1833, followed by outbreaks of measles, flu, and dysentery.

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

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