In December, colleagues from the Stanford School of Medicine Dr Nathan Lo And Mathew Kiang I went to speak.
Infantile immunization rates have decreased slowly but regularly nationally, from 95% in the years preceding the pandemic to less than 93% During the 2023-24 school year.
If even this relatively low decline in measles vaccinations, mumps and rubella (MMR); diphtheria, tetanus and darling (DTAP); polio; And chickenpox held, did they wonder, what would the prevalence of infectious diseases look like in 10 years, or 20? What would happen if vaccination rates increased a little or fell by many?
Lo and Kiang have gathered a statistical model representative of the American population and directed the results.
They have found that if current vaccination rates remain stable in the coming decades, measles – is currently spreading in many regions of the country, but mainly in the Southwest – will be endemic in the United States again in the 25th.
Their results were published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Measles was technically “eliminated” in the United States in 2000, which means that the disease has become sufficiently rare – and sufficiently widespread immunity – that even if a case or two should occur within a community, local transmission stops quickly. During the 25 years that followed, there was 10,570 cases of measlesIncluding the 800 people overshadowed in the epidemic that started in western Texas in January.
But at current vaccination rates, the LO and Kiang estimate, there could be up to 851,300 cases of measles by 2050. According to their calculations, in this time, more than 170,000 people will be hospitalized, and nearly 900 will undergo debilitating and potentially fatal neurological complications. And some 2,550 people will die.
We would not be back in pre-vaccine days, when measles affected more than 4 million people per year and regularly cost the life to At least 400 American children per year. But the disease would become endemic again, which always means present at a basic level, as fluWhich makes millions sick and kills thousands in the United States every year.
“Right now, we should really try to increase vaccination rates,” said Kiang, assistant professor of epidemiology and population health. “If we just keep them as they are, bad things will happen in about two decades.”
Other vaccine preventable diseases would also likely appear in the upcoming quarter of a century – 190 cases of rubella, 18 of polio, eight of diphtheria, according to the models of the Stanford team.
But none would also be likely to return to roar as measles, by far the most infectious in the group.
Parents could no longer count reliably on the immunity of the herd to keep the newborns that are too young to vaccinate away from the disease. Pediatricians and emergency doctors would see patients with measles linked to measles they had probably never encountered in their training or their career.
“I have read a reasonable number of these types of papers, and I think it is exceptional,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a city in New York specialist in pediatric infectious disease. “The number of cases and the negative results of measles and other vaccine preventable diseases they consider are extremely worrying. These are diseases to which American families are not used to thinking or seeing, and they can become common in the near future unless we overthrow the course. ”
Even a relatively low increase in infantile immunization would prevent this scenario, said LO, assistant professor of infectious diseases. If Ror vaccinating rates increased by 5%, the country would only see half of the cases of measles in the next 25 years that it has seen in the last 25.
“A small fraction of the population here can really make the difference in terms of tilting in safer areas,” he said.
The two authors said they considered a new drop in vaccination rates that the result is likely. Since they designed the study for the first time, President Trump took office and appointed secretary to health and social services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime and skeptical criticism of the science of established vaccines.
After promising confirmation hearings that he would not modify the calendar of infant vaccinations in the United States, Kennedy said to HHS employees in February that he plans to investigate infant vaccinations.
Additional drops in vaccination rates could have significant consequences, the researchers revealed. If vaccination rates were to fall by an additional 25% of its place today, the United States would see 26.9 million cases of measles between now and the end of 2050, as well as 80,600 deaths of measles, rubella, polio and combined diphtheria.
“To put this in perspective, most doctors in the United States have seen only one case of these diseases because we have very effective vaccines,” said Dr. Kristina Bryant, pediatric doctor of infectious diseases at the Norton children's hospital in Louisville, Ky.
At a 50%drop, a formerly judicious scenario, the disease would become endemic in the five years. Over the next 25 years, there are 51.2 million cases of measles, 9.9 million cases of rubella and 4.3 million cases of polio. More than 159,000 people would die from vaccine preventable diseases. Some 51,000 children would have neurological complications that change life and 5,400 would be paralyzed by polio – a disease for which there was No case reported since 1993.
A drop in this magnitude of vaccination rates “would really take something unprecedented,” said Kiang. But with regard to public health, he said: “What we have learned in the past few months is that our imagination must be greater in terms of.”
