As a member of the ‘Boomer’ generation I caught measles like everyone else I knew. It is true that when I was growing up measles, mumps and ‘German Measles’, nowadays called rubella, were considered to be childhood diseases that all children got at some point before they became a teenager. They’re just so infectious that it was almost impossible not to catch them.
Personally, I came down with all three between first and fifth grades as did just about everyone I went to school with. Because measles is so infectious it seemed that there was no way to avoid it, so some parents did in fact treat the disease as if catching measles was just a part of growing up, like losing your baby teeth or learning how to go to the bathroom by yourself.
It was never that cute or harmless. First and foremost, measles is viral infection that strikes many parts of the body, yes I know measles is best known for causing an itchy rash on the skin, but it propagates by infecting the respiratory system and then spreading to other victims in coughs and sneezes. About one out of every four children who develop measles wind up in the hospital with pneumonia.
Worst still measles can also infect the nervous system leading to blindness or hearing loss. (I lost most of the hearing in my right ear because of either measles or mumps so don’t call them ‘childhood diseases’ to me.) Finally, between the pneumonia and the attacks on the nervous system measles kills about one or two out of every 1,000 people who contract the disease and remember those are almost always children. Throughout the 50s and 60s an average of about a thousand people died from measles every year here in the US.
That’s why the development of the MMR vaccine, literally Measles, Mumps and Rubella, in 1963 was such a triumph of medical science. The vaccine accomplished much more than just saving every kid from being sick for a few weeks it saved thousands of lives and prevented many more disabilities that would last a lifetime. The campaign to get every child in America immunized with the MMR vaccine actually succeeded in officially eliminating measles in the US in the year 2000.
Unfortunately it didn’t stay that way. There were always a few people who decided not to get their children vaccinated whether out of laziness or lack of concern about their children or, worst reason of all, religion. Occasionally some of those children would travel to other countries where measles was still spreading. Those children would then catch the disease and bring it back into the US with them. Because of that for several decades the US continued to have a small number of measles cases that originated outside the country. Since 97-98% of the children here in the US were vaccinated however the population as a whole had ‘herd immunity’ and the disease was unable to spread.
Unfortunately that was before the spread of the anti-vaccination campaign on the Internet, which if you think about it is sort of a disease isn’t it. Now there had always been people, some even in the scientific community, to whom the idea of purposefully injecting dead or weakened versions of serious disease into our bodies just makes no sense. I’ll even admit that I find it hard to accept that vaccines work, BUT THEY DO!!! Smallpox no longer exists because of vaccines, Polio is now very rare because of vaccines and if you look at the chart above of Measles cases in the US since 1919 it’s obvious that the MMR vaccine works.
But you can’t tell that to the conspiracy mongers who insist that vaccines cause autism, after all there was no such a thing as autism before the MMR vaccine was introduced. In fact autism has existed for centuries but doctors paid little attention to such developmental disorders because they had real diseases to fight like smallpox and polio and measles! It’s just a coincidence that Autism started to be properly diagnosed at about the same time that the MMR vaccine was introduced. Study after study has demonstrated that there is no link between autism and any vaccine. Still, “There is none so blind as those who will not see.” and our ignorant clown of a President has seen fit to install an anti-vaccination nut as the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is determined to find the cause of autism no matter how much he has to falsify the data to make it fit his prejudices.
Thanks to the anti-vaccination campaigners this year, 2025, has seen the largest outbreak of measles in the US since 1990 when some 28,000 cases were reported, although remember that this year is less than one third over. It was in 1990 that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began to recommend a second dose of the MMR vaccine be given to children at an age of four or five.
This year the outbreak is greatest in the state of Texas where a large Mennonite community has for years resisted getting their children vaccinated for religious reasons. The number of confirmed cases in Texas is steadily climbing and is now near 1,000 while outbreaks in 25 other states are adding about another 500, virtually all cases in people who were not vaccinated. There have also been three deaths, all in people who were never vaccinated. Those numbers are as of April 22nd and that’s confirmed cases, health officials in Texas are confident that the real number of cases is two to three times as great.
So here we are, fighting a disease that by all rights should have been eliminated from the US years ago, was officially eliminated thanks to the MMR vaccine. Only because of rumours, lies and distrust has this deadly disease been able to spread once again, striking those who are too young to understand the issues and ignorance that has made them sick.