In the paper that appeared last week, we wish to correct the list of countries travel from which presents the greatest risk to the U.S. in 2019. The following correction will appear in The Lancet Infectious Diseases: The list of countries that pose the highest risk of measles to the USA was been corrected to …
Measles and Austin: A Commentary
A commentary based on my earlier post has appeared in the Austin American Statesman.
Media Response to Travel and Measles Risk
Note: The media office at Johns Hopkins has collected the media sites covering our work--see the Excel File they have produced. I will stop updating this page. Almost all the sources below are found in their list but with some very notable exception, for instance, the New York Times! Our paper on travel-induced risk for …
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Measles Resurgence in the USA: How International Travel Compounds Vaccine Resistance
Lauren Gardner (now at Johns Hopkins University) and I, along with Aleksa Zlojutro (UNSW Sydney) and Kamran Khan (University of Toronto) have just published this paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. It is a spatial risk analysis for measles in the United States. Our point of departure was the spatial analysis of the antivaccine movement in …
Preventing Measles in Austin
Measles has returned to the United States with a vengeance even though it was officially eliminated in 2000. Since that date, until 2014, occasional outbreaks had occurred because of importation of the virus from remaining measles-prone areas of the world. In 2014, there were 667 cases. This year, by the end of April, the case …
Peter Hotez’s Vaccination Book
Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor School of Medicine in Houston (among many other positions), is well-known for bringing Neglected Tropical Diseases to the center of medical attention over the last fifteen years. As Founding Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (in which I have published multiple times) …
Worldwide Measles Outbreaks 2019: Update 25 February
This is the first update on the original 18 February post on measles outbreak 2018. Changes have been made for: Chad, Costa Rica, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Madagascar, Philippines, Ukraine, Vietnam. Country Data (Cases and deaths in 2019, unless otherwise stated.) Australia: 11 cases in January in New South Wales according to a government report; 1 …
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The Problem of Eliminating Measles
I would like to draw attention to a recent blog post by Professor Raina MacIntyre of the University of New South Wales (with whom I have occasionally collaborated). MacIntyre points out the complexity of any attempt to eliminate measles completely partly because of how infectious it is: elementary herd immunity calculations show that the required minimum …
Worldwide Measles Outbreaks 2019
In response to the surge of measles outbreaks in the U.S. this year, Lauren Gardner, who is in the process of moving to Johns Hopkins from the University of New South Wales, and I are doing a risk analysis that combines the geography of hotspots of vaccine avoidance (from Olive et al. 2018) with international …
Waiting for a Measles Epidemic
CNN has a comment from Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the recent measles outbreaks in Washington and Oregon. This was a predicted disaster waiting to happen, given that these two states are in the top five nationally for the percentage of children who have nonmedical exemptions from compulsory vaccinations. Last year Peter Hotez and several collaborators …
Sahotra Sarkar 