Asheville – Buncombe County Health and Human Services has once again blitzed social media with requests that people get vaccinated for measles. There are no recent reports of measles cases in Buncombe County; the last confirmed case of measles in North Carolina was in 2024. A child living in Mecklenburg County became ill after traveling to an unnamed foreign country, and details were not published to protect patient privacy. Last year, Buncombe County Interim Health Director Jennifer Mullendore reported that there were three confirmed cases in Eastern Tennessee.
On June 12, the CDC report, which is updated weekly, had tallied 1,197 confirmed cases, 21 outbreaks, 144 hospitalizations, and three deaths in the United States. This compares to 284 confirmed cases for the entirety of last year.
Myth busters are of the opinion that measles is not and should not be a normal part of childhood. In addition to the red spots, measles typically comes with fever, coughing, respiratory inflammation, eye irritation, and general malaise. The symptoms have been described as “severe, flu-like, and some people are remembering their misery eighty years after the fact. Worse, measles can bring on complications like pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. Quoted hospitalization rates for people afflicted with measles range from 12-25%.
Measles is a highly-contagious, airborne respiratory virus. This means no amount of antibiotics or sanitization will protect against it. It is estimated that 90% of unprotected people exposed to the virus, even by stepping into a room two hours after an infected person coughed, will catch it. Alternative remedies like inhaled corticosteroids or Vitamin A do not attack the virus, may ameliorate symptoms, and may prove harmful if mismanaged.
Vaccination is the only treatment standard methods of scientific inquiry have deemed safe and effective. The scientific method, incidentally, has not been able to establish a connection between autism and vaccines.
The vaccine was relatively easy to develop because measles has only been known to infect humans. According to the Infectious Disease Society of America, “Before the vaccine was available in 1963, nearly every child got measles by age 15. The disease sickened 3 million to 4 million people and led to about 500 deaths and 48,000 hospitalizations every year in the U.S.” Then, “due to a highly effective vaccination program, measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, a historic public health achievement.”
Writing for uptodate.com, Hayley Gans, et al., explained why measles has not been irradicated globally and is making a comeback in the United States. “Due to social and political factors and high transmissibility, elimination has been achieved in very few areas of the world. Additionally, disruptions in vaccine coverage due to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine hesitancy have led to increased numbers of global measles outbreaks.”
According to county officials, Buncombe is one of those places where people are living beneath their privileges when it comes to vaccination. “We have a vaccine that is 97% effective against measles after two doses,” shared Buncombe County’s Public Health Director Dr. Ellis Matheson. If only 95% of residents could get vaccinated, then the odds of anybody catching the disease would become next to negligible.
Getting people vaccinated, however, is easier said than done. It is understandable that people don’t want to put things they can’t see in their bodies. Mistrust for government as well as medicine is on the rise, and conspiracy media is at everybody’s fingertips. Unfortunately, those who get measles are preponderantly those who are not vaccinated; and, worse, measles outbreaks are going to occur in clusters of unvaccinated people, such as families who listen to the same antivax programs or neighbors who attend the same alternative therapy classes.
The county’s website, buncombecounty.org, helps people find out if they should take a medical exemption from vaccinations, if they’re up-to-date on their vaccinations, where they can get their MMP (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccinations, and how to get financial assistance if necessary.