Seven children in Minnesota have come down with measles since February in an outbreak that public health officials are blaming, in part, on parents’ fears about having their youngsters vaccinated for the disease.
The seven children with measles have ranged in age from 7 months to four years, and they include two Somali children who had not been given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Officials said the vaccination rate has dropped in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, largely because of concerns about a possible link between the vaccine and autism.
One doctor estimates that as many as 70 percent of the Somalis he knows have not given their children the vaccine. “Every family will tell you that, ‘We’re not going to give our children the MMR. We’re afraid that they’re going to get autism,’” Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed told Minnesota Public Radio.
State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield said that before the current outbreak, there had been only six measles cases in Minnesota over the previous five years. Investigators have traced the outbreak to an infant who traveled to Kenya and returned home in the beginning of February.
Nationally, as the Associated Press reports, the most recent federal figures show only 140 reported cases of measles across the country in 2008. Worldwide, however, the disease strikes nearly 10 million people, and kills 200,000, annually.
Typically, children get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine at 12 months of age and a booster shot three to five years later. Officials said in a statement that at least three of the new measles cases involved children who “were of age but were not vaccinated.”
The first case was reported March 4. Officials are concerned that the disease could easily spread to other children in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area who have not been vaccinated.
Fears of a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism were fostered by a paper published in 1998 in the prestigious British journal The Lancet. However, the study and its author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, long since have been discredited.
In rare instances, children’s vaccines have been found to cause brain-damage known as encephalopathy that can produce autism-like symptoms. But medical authorities overwhelmingly continue to support vaccinations, saying they are necessary to avoid the return of the diseases that largely have been suppressed.
As Lynfield, referring to the recent measles cases in Minnesota, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Unless we keep the vaccination rate high, we will turn the clock back and have these outbreaks.”
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I have read in several articles that “some of the measles victims” were not vaccinated. Does this mean that some of the measles victims were vaccinated and still transmitted the disease?
None of the children were vaccinated. You cannot transmit the disease from the vaccination. The MMR vaccine is not a live virus.
The MMR is a live virus vaccine which does shed and can spread the disease. One only has to read the manufacturers package insert for accurate information.
Does anyone know the official symptoms for measles?? My son is 3 years old and some symptoms I found online match up with every symptom he has so far!! I live in Monticello, MN.