A faculty-age child has died of measles in West Texas, the primary death from the disease in a decade in america. The kid had not been vaccinated against measles, in keeping with the town of Lubbock’s health department.
The death, confirmed by Katherine Wells, the Lubbock health department’s director of public health, is an element of a fast-moving outbreak that is infected at the very least 124 people — mostly children — in rural West Texas.
The official tally of people that have been hospitalized is eighteen, in keeping with the Texas Department of State Health Services.
That number is not up up to now, said Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Kid’s Hospital in Lubbock.
Johnson said in an email that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles up to now.
All of those kids, she said, were admitted because they were having trouble respiratory. None had been vaccinated against measles.
The outbreak has been limited up to now to parts of Texas bordering Recent Mexico. That state has also reported nine measles cases, but officials haven’t said whether or not they are connected.
It’s unclear how the outbreak originated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Texas Department of State Health Services told NBC News that genotype testing had linked the outbreak to a strain of the measles virus called D8 currently circulating in Europe and the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region, which incorporates countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Not one of the samples have been linked to the vaccine.
That is the primary measles death to be reported within the U.S. since 2015, when a Washington woman died. Health officials on the time said she’d likely been exposed at a clinic in a rural a part of the state that was experiencing an outbreak.
Measles was considered eliminated within the U.S. in 2000 due to widespread use of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR), in keeping with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two doses of the shot are 97% effective in stopping the disease.Â
