THE WRETCHED BLEMISH

What’s the deal with the measles? (Offered in the tone and tempo of Jerry Seinfeld, of course.) Measles outbreaks are taking up a lot of time and space, even here in Canada, in the traditional and new press. Along with that, I keep reading that RFK Jr, the new head of America’s Health and Human Services, is promoting things backward and upside down as preventatives or cures and generally making everything worse, as he's always so determined to do.

So what do you suspect I will find if, as objectively as possible, I attempt to learn about the history of measles in America, the recent scenario and current outbreak, and go and look up what the HHS leadership has been offering the public during what some (medical professionals in the media and publishing on social media) claim could be the start of a historically significant epidemic? Let’s find out. (BEWARE, HE’S DOING HIS OWN RESEARCH!)

HISTORY

When I go looking, I find that data on measles was first gathered in the US in 1912. That year it became a nationally notifiable disease and, thusly, any cases and deaths from the illness required formal reporting. I learn that the case rate was up around 700 per 100,000 people (or, better, roughly half a million reported and maybe as high as a few million unreported among a total US population of 100,000,000) and that fatalities from the disease in that year were approximately 6,000. And I learn that average annual cases through the 1910s and 1920s were roughly in the same range, as were fatalities, likely somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. I also learn that a licensed and publicly available vaccination against this illness wouldn’t arrive for another 40 years, not until 1963.

So, I wonder, what did the death totals look like in the 1940s and ‘50s? Why that's interesting is that this period was still prior to a vaccine but the population was far larger and with far more folks living in close quarters in the city (with the country going from about 45% urban to nearly 70%, many major cities doubling or quadrupling in population, and with unprecedented boom in the infant cohort.) One might expect yearly measles cases way up and deaths to be approaching 10,000 at that time (and maybe this regular and significant loss of life is precisely what spurred a more vigorous search for a vaccine…) That's what I assumed. Well, if like me you thought that you would be dead wrong. That was not the situation, not at all.

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