Q: How dangerous is measles?
A: For most people, according to health experts, measles is miserable but not life-threatening. The most common symptoms include fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. However, a very small fraction of people get much sicker, and can suffer complications like pneumonia and encephalitis. Before there was a vaccine, about 450 to 500 Americans died from measles each year, on average. Also, measles can cause pregnant women to have premature, fragile babies.
Q: How is measles spread?
A: Measles is considered one of the most infectious diseases known. The virus is spread through the air when someone infected coughs or sneezes. It can live up to two hours in the air or on the surfaces of a room afterward. It's so contagious that 90 percent of people who aren't immunized are infected if exposed to the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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An infant with measles entered the country last week from Kyrgyzstan and is now being treated in Atlanta, state health authorities said Monday. The child represents the first measles case in Georgia in nearly three years.
The baby's parents were moving from Kyrgyzstan, in central Asia, to settle in DeKalb County, said Nancy Nydam, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Public Health. The gender of the child, who is not yet a year old, has not been disclosed.
The family flew last week to Istanbul, Turkey, from Istanbul to Chicago, and from Chicago to Atlanta last week, Nydam said. The stage of the infection while the family was traveling is not yet clear — measles is highly contagious and is spread through the air through coughing or sneezing. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is working with airlines and Georgia authorities to identify and contact passengers who sat in rows immediately in front of, behind or to the side of the family on the flight to Atlanta.
Nydam said exposure to people at Hartsfield-Jackson was likely minimal.
The parents took the ailing infant over the weekend to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, where treatment of the child continued on Monday.
The Georgia case is not related to the measles outbreak that infected more than 100 people and spread to 14 states in January, officials said. Most of those cases have been linked to an outbreak at Disneyland in California.
“We don’t need to be alarmists. We need to be aware,” said Dr. Patrick O’Neal, the state's director of health protection. “What happened in Disneyland is an alert that we live in a world now in which international travel is very common and frequent, and diseases are only hours away.”
Georgia has only had 11 measles cases since 2002, including this one, and all of them either originated outside the United States or were linked to a case that had, the Public Health Department said in a news release.
The problem confronting public health authorities is that few nations do as good a job of vaccinating against measles as the United States does.
Worldwide, measles is still a leading killer of children. Nearly 146,000 people died from measles infections in 2013 – the equivalent of 400 deaths per day, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO said measles deaths had declined 75 percent from 2000 to 2013 because of more aggressive vaccination programs.
Even in the U.S. however, there are still parents and some health care practitioners who are cautious about immunizing children.
“Most diseases are nothing to fool around with,” said Rachel Marynowski, an Atlanta naturopathic doctor who counsels families who question the need and efficacy of vaccines.
While Marynowski is not against vaccinating, she does question the decades-long practice of how they are administered. Getting sick builds immunity in the long run, she said, as the body builds antibodies to a disease. But even though vaccines are administered to children after their first few months of life and are ongoing until they are school-aged, a child can still get sick if they’re too young to be immunized.
Marynowski said she talks about this with parents who are questioning whether to immunize their children, but that ultimately there should be room for a parent to decide what’s in the best interest of their children.
“I think there’s a place for vaccines, I just think we need to reconsider them,” she said. “You can’t take a cookie cutter approach to it because every child is different. Every child has their own bio-chemistry and needs to be cared for differently
Researchers at the CDC and elsewhere, however, consider that position reckless in the face of a growing outbreak.
Email staff writers Fran Jeffries or Rosalind Bentley.
