GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – A national measles outbreak has local health officials carefully monitoring its movement.
In 2019 alone, there have been confirmed cases in ten different states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“So far in January and February of 2019 there have been already 101 cases,” says Dr. Thomas Huffer, Executive Medical Director of HSHS St. Vincent Children’s Hospital and a pediatrician at Prevea Health. “So there is definitely more measles going on across the country.”
That statistic becomes more jarring when compared to just two years ago, when there were 120 confirmed measles cases in the entire calendar year, according to the CDC.
One of the major concerns surrounding measles is that it’s highly contagious and can spread rapidly in certain environments.
“If you expose a hundred people to the measles virus over ninety of them are going to get it, unless they are immune to measles,” says Dr. Huffer.
Those alarming numbers represent the danger measles present if it infiltrates a community.
Thankfully, Wisconsin is not one of the ten states where a confirmed case has been discovered, but nearby Illinois is on the list.
For Dr. Huffer, that means it’s paramount for those throughout the state to get vaccinated to stave off the virus.
“If you have somebody who has measles come into a community where there’s a significant number of unimmunized people it can spread,” he explains.
Around one in one-thousand people with the virus die, which may not seem likely, but it’s a higher rate than other viruses.
“This has a higher fatality rate than influenza,” he says.
And certain groups of people have shown to be more susceptible to the virus becoming fatal.
“If the elderly get it, pregnant females, people with immune suppression, those are all the people that are more likely to die from measles,” explains Dr. Huffer.
The measles virus can inflict someone with a fever and sore throat initially, before advancing to a cumbersome rash.
