Measles is an airborne virus, and one of the most easily spread diseases known. Up to 90% of people who are not immune will become infected if exposed. Measles symptoms appear 10-14 days after infection. It causes a high fever, sore throat, dry cough, and the characteristic red, splotchy rash all over the body.
Serious complications can include pneumonia and encephalitis. Symptoms usually last 7-10 days. Measles can also be fatal. Antibiotics only treat bacterial infections and can do little if anything for a viral infection like measles.
The virus overpowers the immune system, in many cases damaging it beyond repair in survivors. Many people who have had measles have lifelong health issues afterward. Most people who have had measles are immune to it afterward, but a large number can have suppressed immune systems afterward. The virus can cause blindness. Measles has also left patients deaf or with serious hearing problems. In more severe cases, brain damage is possible.
The disease first emerged in Europe around the fifth century AD. The first description of measles comes from the Middle East about 400 years later. Serious measles epidemics were recorded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Because many children encountered it, measles was often described as a “childhood disease,” but the effects were hardly child’s play. A measles outbreak in 1531 left millions of Native Americans dead in Honduras and Mexico, at least half the population. A Hawaii outbreak left one-fifth of the islanders dead in the 1850s. From 1850 to 2000, the disease left an estimated 200 million dead worldwide, including millions of children dead each year.
In 1963, Dr. Maurice Hilleman developed the first successful measles vaccine. No longer did people have to worry about the deadly pathogen. The vaccine was more than 95% effective. Preventative medicine through the vaccine would save lives. Vaccination meant that parents no longer had to spend sleepless nights wondering if their children would survive another night with measles. Vaccination meant that local cemeteries would no longer be filled with young children. Children would live longer and healthier lives thanks to the vaccine.
The rapid spread of measles and the misery it caused became a staple in cartoons through the 1940s and 1950s. Vaccination meant that the dark gallows humor of measles on a Tom and Jerry cartoon would be lost on later generations of children in the 1970s and 1980s for whom the danger of the disease would never be known. Schools and community health clinics organized mass vaccinations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, measles had been all but eliminated in the United States.
In distant corners of the world, far removed from the United States, measles continued to be a serious problem. In the meantime, doctors and nurses were rapidly vaccinating children globally, which led to disease rates and mortality rates plummeting. By 1999, measles still killed roughly 873,000 people around the world with infection rates falling to near zero in the United States. By 2005, annual death rates dropped to 345,000. By 2017, these global death rates had dropped another two-thirds to near 120,000 thanks to vaccines. The World Health Organization, for example, reports that Mexico had a 97% measles vaccination rate in 2021, a rate comparable to the US.
The rise of social media in recent years meant an increasing number of people took comfort in deceptive memes often meant as perverse jokes instead of the experience of trained doctors. Quacks and frauds took advantage of limited scientific knowledge of individuals and led more people to question the safety of vaccines. However, no serious study has ever shown any question of the safety or effectiveness of the measles vaccine.
One deeply flawed study briefly raised the question in the late 1990s, but the study was immediately found to be a lie; and subsequent studies and reports confirmed the safety of the measles vaccine with each succeeding year. Nevertheless, vaccination rates began to drop as a result. Outbreaks erupted periodically across the country as vaccination rates fell. In the end, parents who ignored the advice of doctors to vaccinate their children increasingly had to take their infected, sickly, and dying children to these same doctors for treatment.
And now, West Texas.
Measles had become a forgotten scourge. Vaccines saved millions of lives. And now American families with infected loved ones, in spite of all the advantages modern science and preventative medicine offered, are reduced to the same despair that haunted families in centuries past, wondering what horrors will visit their ailing children as each hour ticks by.
