text: Good news from the infectious disease community: Endemic measles—meaning cases caused by local strains instead of imported ones—has been banished from the U.S. and the rest of the Americas. “The region of the Americas is the first in the world to have eliminated measles,” the Pan American Health Organization announced in a press release Tuesday. But this is strictly referring to measles cases that originate in the Americas—outbreaks in the region will continue to occur due to imported measles from other parts of the world.
  Measles is a viral disease that can cause severe health problems such as pneumonia, blindness, and brain swelling. It can even lead to death in some circumstances, the PAHO says. What's worse, the virus, which is passed by coughing and sneezing, is highly contagious. “Measles is the single most easily transmissible virus that we know,” William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tells SELF. “It’s extraordinary that we’ve been able to eliminate this disease all the way from the mountains of Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego.”
  But measles outbreaks will continue in the U.S. and other American areas, board-certified infectious disease specialist Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, tells SELF. U.S. outbreaks of the disease occur each year, like the one in Disneyland in 2014 that sickened 145 people in North America alone. The U.S. actually experienced a record number of measles cases in 2014, with a whopping 667 from 27 states, per data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. And according to data from the CDC, there have already been 54 cases of measles in the U.S. in 2016.
  However, the last endemic measles case in the Americas was in Venezuela in 2002, according to PAHO. It usually takes three years without local cases for health officials to say a disease has been eradicated, but this announcement took 14 years due to issues like subpar communication and fighting in various regions, says the New York Times.
  This news is "a major success for public health and will be a model to build on for worldwide elimination," Mark Hicar, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo and an expert in pediatric infectious diseases with UBMD Pediatrics, tells SELF. “This shows how effective the measles vaccine is when used appropriately,” Adalja says.
  Indeed, PAHO credits this landmark achievement to a 22-year effort that involved mass vaccinations against the disease, as well as mumps and rubella, throughout the region. According to data released by the CDC in 2015, 90 percent of children under age three were vaccinated against measles (in addition to polio, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and chickenpox).
  That’s why it’s still so important to immunize against measles. “There’s still measles in the rest of the world—and the world is a very small neighborhood,” Schaffner says. “We have to keep vaccinating each and every child that’s born in both North and South America for the foreseeable future in order to keep measles away.”
  MaryAnn Tran, M.D., an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Michigan State University, is on board with this thinking. "We have to be really careful in how we interpret this," she tells SELF. "We could always get cases imported in." There are people who choose not to get vaccinated, can't get vaccinated for health reasons, or are too young for vaccines—if they come into contact with someone who brings measles over from outside the Americas, they run the risk of becoming infected and sparking an outbreak, Adalja explains.
  Although the U.S. population has what’s known as herd immunity (protection from a disease due to a high number of the population being vaccinated for it) against measles, that could change with time based on vaccinations. “This elimination is only as strong as our herd immunity,” Adalja says. “If people don’t vaccinate against measles, you run the risk of eroding this milestone that we made.”
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  Korin is a former New Yorker who now lives at the beach. She received a double B.A. in International Relations and Marketing from The College of William & Mary (which she doesn't use at all now) and an M.A. in Interactive Journalism from American University. Korin has been published in... Read more
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