There are upsides to being a baby boomer. Among them: senior discounts, wisdom born of decades of experience, einiklach, if one has been so blessed…and immunity to measles.
That’s because those of us who were born before 1957 almost certainly contracted the disease as children.
When I did, I had a high fever, the characteristic red rash and, as my parents recounted years later, hallucinations that propelled me into their bedroom in the middle of the night crying “The ring! The ring!”
Measles was just part of childhood back then, as were mumps and rubella. They no longer are, because the vast majority of American kids are vaccinated against all three diseases (that’s the MMR shot).
I recovered, baruch Hashem, as did my classmates when it was their turn to be feverish and blotched. We and our parents were blissfully unaware that, while most children infected with measles get better and have no lasting problems, some don’t and do.
Some infected children will go on to develop pneumonia or inflammation of the brain.
We didn’t know, when I was a child, that hundreds of children died from measles each year in the US. Measles has a fatality rate of only 0.1 percent, but an estimated 20 percent of cases require hospitalization.
Nor did we (or anyone) know that measles can cause what’s known as immunity amnesia—the virus’ wiping out many of a person’s preexisting antibodies against other pathogens, leaving them more vulnerable to different diseases.
We were equally oblivious to the fact that, while rare, something called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE, can be a legacy of measles infection. That is a degenerative neurological condition that typically develops seven to ten years after recovery from a measles infection. And it is almost always fatal.
And SSPE may not be as rare as once thought. A review of measles cases in California found that, between 1988 and 1991, SSPE cases occurred as frequently as 1 in every 1,367 cases in unvaccinated children under age five.
What has thrust measles into the media’s spotlight these days are the more than 300 cases (at this writing) of the disease that have appeared in western Texas, with several dozen hospitalizations and two measles-related deaths. And the hundreds of other measles cases in 14 other states so far this year—Alaska, Maryland, Oklahoma, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Measles, moreover, is the most contagious disease transmitted directly between people. It spreads through airborne droplets, released when an infected person so much as breathes.
If someone with measles passes through a room, infectious droplets can hang in the air for hours afterward.
What’s more, in the first few days after infection, measles’ symptoms are often limited to symptoms easily dismissed as the results of a simple cold. And so, people with measles might not isolate themselves when they are highly contagious.
What made measles essentially non-existent for so many years was widespread vaccination. But vaccination rates have fallen and, while measles is not a widespread problem at present, the potential effects of the combination of increased popular resistance to vaccination and the disease’s inherent virality cannot be ignored.
There is no cure for measles. The new secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has promoted treatments for it, including cod liver oil, steroids and antibiotics.
No studies, however, have shown any benefit from any of those treatments (although vitamin A has been shown to improve survival of malnourished children in developing countries when they contract measles).
Mr. Kennedy, who has expressed skepticism about vaccines in general, has said that he does not oppose vaccination against measles but feels that it should be a “personal” choice.
That raises the question, of course, of what happens when enough people’s personal choices contribute to the loss of herd immunity—the limitation of a contagious disease’s spread born of a very high rate of vaccination.
I won’t venture into that philosophical forest here. I only note that vaccination for measles is very effective.
As is being a senior citizen.
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