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The record-breaking measles outbreak in South Carolina has reached nearly 800 cases, making it the largest spread of the disease in the U.S. since it was first declared eliminated at the start of the century.
The South Carolina Department of Health on Tuesday reported 89 new measles cases since Friday, bringing the current outbreak total to 789. That figure surpasses the 762 cases confirmed in West Texas last year.
Health officials in the Palmetto State said 557 people are still in quarantine until Feb. 19, and 20 people are in isolation.
The outbreak, which began last September, has been concentrated in South Carolina’s Upstate region, where nearly 90 percent of those who are sick are children under the age of 17. Students at nearly two dozen schools have been quarantined due to measles exposure.
The number of cases held somewhat steady through last fall but quickly accelerated over the holidays, with a state dashboard showing cases jumped from 181 cases on Dec. 21 to 434 cases by Jan. 4.
Most cases, 695, are in unvaccinated people, according to health officials. Another 14 cases are in individuals who have received one of the recommended two-dose MMR vaccine, 20 cases are in already-vaccinated individuals. The vaccination status of individuals in 60 cases is unknown.
Health officials noted that at least 18 people, including adults and children, have been hospitalized for complications since the start of the outbreak; however, patients are not required to report that information to the agency.
The benchmark in South Carolina comes as the U.S. is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status after more than two decades.
A country technically loses the status after 12 months of consistent spread of the disease, a milestone the U.S. hit on Jan. 20. However, Ralph Abraham, a former Louisiana surgeon general who was sworn in as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) principal deputy director in December, said it was too soon to make a determination.
“The United States would lose the elimination status when a chain of transmission — and those are important words too — last for 12 months or more. Now, what is the chain of transmission? It’s defined as all cases linked to a common source through an epidemic linkage. So those things matter,” Abraham said, dismissing the possibility as the “cost of doing business.”
Experts have previously drawn a connection between the anti-vaccine rhetoric coming from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. amid the spread of measles. Kennedy has long promoted the scientifically unproven claim that vaccines, including the MMR vaccine, are linked to autism in children.
“This is a very clear example of the damage that the anti-vaccine movement has done in the United States,” Fiona Havers, adjunct associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine and a former infectious disease staffer at the CDC, told The Hill last December.
“There are a number of things that have made these ongoing outbreaks very difficult to control. One is that the decades of false information about measles vaccines that [Kennedy Jr.] and other people in the anti-vaccine movement have been spreading has led to a decline in vaccination rates,” she added.
English (US) ·