The New Yorker: The Message of Measles

Read full article

Measles - common.wikimedia.org

"Measles, often called the most contagious disease on earth, is an airborne virus. If a person with measles walks into a room, the pathogens can linger there for two hours after the person has gone. In the New Square shul, this meant that as many as seven thousand people had shared airspace with the young man from Israel. It was fortunate that the room was so big and even, perhaps, that the women (and their small children) were in the balcony, away from the men and Patient Zero; pregnant women and small children are at the greatest risk. Still, McDonald told me, “people are very close. A cough or a sneeze by someone higher up in the bleachers would have the opportunity to dispense to a great number of people.”

"As the summer progressed, the line held. The camps, it turned out, produced no new cases, and the pace of infection slowed, at least in New York. In late July, Rockland County ended its state of emergency. There was one fatality: an El Al flight attendant who went into a coma and died this month after falling ill on a flight from New York. One in a thousand. Two weeks ago, five new cases sprouted up in a Mennonite community near Buffalo, but these were considered, by the C.D.C., to be a new chain, unrelated to the one that started with the travellers from Israel. The broader sturdiness of vaccination rates statewide, and a collaborative public-health effort that Zucker called “a tour de force,” seemed to have stalled the outbreak and to have at least made it possible to imagine the retention of elimination status, come October. “I do believe that if we hadn’t done it this way, by throwing everything we could at it, on an array of fronts, the numbers would have been much, much worse,” Zucker said, last week. This was, in some ways, a medical equivalent of the Powell Doctrine, and the next campaign would be the looming school year and a renewed effort to persuade the hesitant. But it was hard to celebrate, amid an atmosphere, nationwide, of mounting misinformation and mistrust—a summer of racist shootings, ice-cap meltdowns, federal-agency scientist purges, Epstein conspiracy theories, and Bill Hader deep fakes. From his office in Albany, Zucker now speed-mumbles about e-cigarettes, Ebola, the flu, and what he and not he alone considers to be an all-out war on science. We bring the problem, anyway. ¨