The measles was confirmed in a resident of the County of Los Angeles who recently returned from Texas, a state which is in the midst of an epidemic of highly infectious disease, health officials announced on Friday.
The epidemic in Texas has been one of the worst views of the United States for years, and has cost the lives of two school-aged children who were not vaccinated and had no underlying medical conditions, according to a report published Thursday in the weekly report of the morbidity and mortality of the centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is the third case of measles reported by the Los Angeles County Ministry of Public Health this year. In March, A county resident who had recently traveled at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from China Airlines from Taipei, Taiwan, was tested positive. And in FebruaryA case was reported in a non-the county resident who arrived on a Korean air flight from Seoul.
“The traveler was not contagious during the trip period,” the County Public Health Department said on Friday in a statement concerning the most recent case.
Officials work to identify people who may have been exposed while the infected person was contagious by the virus.
Symptoms of measles include a high fever – above 101 degrees – coughing, rolling nose, red and aqueous eyes and a rash, which generally begins on the face and spreads to the rest of the body.
Measles can easily spread in the air and can stay in the air and on surfaces for hours, even after a infectious person left the room.
People can spread measles to others from four days before the revealing eruption of the disease appears over four days later, according to the CDC. People who have not been immunized against measles, either by vaccination or previous infection, risk falling ill between seven and 21 days after exposure.
Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective against infection, according to health officials.
CDC managers identified 10 measles epidemics nationwide. The largest has started in a very united community with low vaccination rates in the County of Texas Gaines, next to the New Mexico.
This epidemic has since spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, and is suspected of being linked to more cases in Kansas, according to the CDC report. An increasing epidemic in the Mexican state of Chihuahua was also reported after a resident fell ill after visiting the county of sheaths.
So far this year, 884 cases of measles have been reported nationally, “the second annual number of annual cases in 25 years”, according to the weekly Morbidity and Mortality report.
During 2024, 285 cases of measles were reported nationally.
Among the cases reported so far this year, the patient's median age was 8 years. About a third of infected people were under 5 years old, according to the report. Among all patients with measles, 96% were not vaccinated or had unknown vaccination status.
Nationally, 85 patients with measles this year had to be hospitalized. With the exception of one, not all were vaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. Texas officials said the cause of the last death of state measles was Pulmonary insufficiency of measles.
Most of the measles reported so far nationwide this year are linked to welded communities with low vaccination coverage, the CDC said.
Before Friday's announcement, nine cases of measles had been reported in California this year, the cases also reported in the counties of Orange, Riverside, Fresno, San Mateo, Place and Tuolumne, according to the California Department of Public Health.
In 2024, California confirmed 15 cases of measles. In 2023, the total was only four.
California Worse measles epidemic In a recent memory, it took place between December 2014 and April 2015. Centered in Disneyland, the epidemic led to an infected of around 131 Californians. People of six other states, Mexico and Canada have also been sick, according to at California Department of Public Health.
After this epidemic, California legislators Reinforced childhood vaccination Requirements for schoolchildren. For the academic year 2023-24, 96.2% of California's planters were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.
It is slightly down compared to the 96.5% given the previous year. But it remains above the levels recorded before the epidemic of Disneyland measles, which was less than 94%.
Public health experts say that they are targeting a 95% measle vaccination rate to protect themselves against epidemics.
In the midst of current epidemics, pediatricians have intensified efforts to refute disinformation on the disease and the vaccine.
“The measles vaccine is safe and effective,” said the American Academy of Pediatrics statementRefute what they called “influencers of well-being and anti-vaccine defenders” who say they “wrongly affirm” that being vaccinated “is as dangerous as contracting measles itself”.
“In -depth research shows that the ROR vaccine is safe and considerably reduces the risk of measles, a disease that can cause serious complications and death,” said the pediatric group.
