A similar situation happened three months later when a person who visited Eastern Europe returned to a community with strong ties to a local church group in Vancouver, Wash. More than 50 people were sickened there.
In both cases, U.S. travelers picked up measles in foreign countries where the highly contagious disease was running rampant and brought it back to places where vaccination rates were too low by U.S. public health standards, prompting the worst outbreaks seen in those states in decades, according to the report.
However, health officials said the two outbreaks appear to be winding down after concerted efforts to pinpoint the origins and inoculate those who were exposed but unprotected against measles. There also are efforts to educate parents who had resisted vaccines for their children.
The disease has spread mostly among school-age children whose parents declined to get them vaccinated.
One factor for why parents did not vaccinate their kids is mere “complacency” in an age where the potential ravages of measles are not familiar to parents who came of age after the vaccine was introduced in 1957, said New York State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, MD.
The measles crises in New York and Washington offer a lesson about the importance of maintaining a minimum level of “herd” immunization against harmful and preventable diseases such as measles, health officials said.
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