Return of Measles

Regular measles is back . . . This could happen to your child: death . . . brain

damage . . . blindness . . . deafness . . .

That ominous, red-lettered legend is emblazoned on flyers circulated in Washington, D.C., where public health officials mounted a massive emergency vaccination campaign to curb an outbreak of common measles. Nor is Washington the only city in the U.S. fighting a childhood disease that was generally believed to have been almost stamped out by the effective vaccines available since 1963. Cleveland, Chicago, Corpus Christi and Los Angeles, among others, have reported sharp increases in the number of measles cases. For the entire U.S., the rate of reported cases has soared 50% in one year.

Communication Gap. Too many mothers still believe that measles is one of those unavoidable childhood diseases that disappear after seven days of spots and fever. The facts are grimmer. Before the development of the vaccine, almost 4,000,000 children caught measles every year. Thousands of them came down with encephalitis and other serious complications. Some were severely retarded as a result of brain damage, and one out of every 1,000 died.

The problem, like many others, is most severe in ghetto areas of central cities. There, because of indifference or ignorance, only 46% of the preschool children have been vaccinated. As Dr. James O. Mason, deputy director of Atlanta's National Communicable Disease Center, explained: "We just have not learned how to communicate with parents in the ghetto."

Distant Goal. The message has not been heard in many rural areas either. On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, more than 50 children, many from pineapple workers' families, came down with measles despite a state law making vaccination mandatory before entering school. The reason: no one enforced the health regulations. In eastern Nebraska, local doctors opposed the vaccination program. The reported cases of measles in that state have jumped from 47 last year to almost 1,000 so far in 1970.

As a result of a federally supported drive on measles that began in 1964, the number of reported cases in the U.S. fell dramatically from 450,000 that year to 22,000 in 1968. Last year, the Vaccination Assistance Act expired. Many states have fallen behind in immunization although other federal money is available. Almost 8,000,000 children between the ages of one and twelve still have not been vaccinated, and only 19 states require vaccination by law. Without further prodding from the Federal Government, the eradication of common measles remains a distant goal.

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