The “warm support” of the Secretary of Health of Measles Vaccination puts the US. Uu at risk of losing their statement of elimination of the disease already in January, said the former regulator of the Food and Medicines Administration on Tuesday, as experts warn of Texas, it can become among the largest registry.
“Given the current measles outbreak, anything less than a press on the complete sincere court so that many more children vaccine against measles, above 90% throughout the country, is a failure of public health,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the former director of the FDA Biological Evaluation and Research Center, which was expelled last month, told NBC News in an interview.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Texas health officials said the state outbreak had extended to 22 counties and continues to spread in Lubbock, where cases jumped from 10 to 36. From Tuesday, Tuesday, on Tuesday, on Tuesday, on Tuesday, The number of measles cases in the state reached 505, compared to 481 cases on Friday. About 70% of cases are children, said Katherine Wells, director of Public Health at Lubbock. He added six or seven children in a nursery in Lubbock, added positive for measles.
At least 57 people have been hospitalized in the area. On Saturday, a school -age girl who was treated for complications related to measles died in Lubbock, becoming the second pediatric death in the rapid outbreak. Both children were not vaccinated.
More than 650 Sammampión cases have been reported in 21 states and the Columbia district this year, more than double the number of US cases throughout 2024, according to a NBC news count.
On Sunday, Kennedy, who went to Texas to visit the family of the child who died, published in X that the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations had flattened.
However, the case count is probably an underestimation, experts say, since many people are not proven and diseases are not detected.
During Tuesday’s press call, Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior doctor of an infectious disease doctor at the Johns Hopkins Center for health safety, “if he already has two deaths in Texas, tells him that he is thousands.”
“I suspect that this is probably one of the largest registered,” said Adalja.
Wells said in the call: “We are in this long term.”
“We are constantly adding more counties that have been exposed to Texas; we are seeing that this grows out of Texas and other states,” Wells said.
A ‘blow to our achievements’
Marks said Kennedy needs to push parents to vaccinate their children more than ever, which says Kennedy is not doing.
In a publication about X, Kennedy wrote: “The most effective way to prevent measles spread is the MMR vaccine.”
However, Kennedy did not encourage people to get vaccinated. Remedios also pushed, including a steroid called Budesonide, an antibiotic called clarithromycin and cod liver oil, a high vitamin A supplement. None are proven treatments for measles, experts say. The high doses of vitamin A can cause nausea, vomiting and liver damage, especially in young children.
“It comes out with the most warm back of the vaccination it could,” said Marks.
Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, has one of the highest state vaccine exemption rates, with almost 18%, compared to 3% nationwide, according to state data.
If more children are not vaccinated, more of them will die, said Marks, and the United States will lose the state of elimination of the measles since 2000.
A country loses its status once an outbreak extends more than 12 months, he said. The health services of the Texas State Department issued their first alert about measles in January. Adalja, by Johns Hopkins, said the outbreak will be “really something that pushes us to the deadline for the elimination of the United States, as well as for the Americas.”
“I think we are on their way,” said Marks, referring to the National Measles of the Nation.
An official of the Department of Health and Human Services said that Mark’s suggestion that the support of the administration’s vaccination has been “warm” is inaccurate.
“Contrary to Dr. Mark’s claims, the department has been working aggressively to address the current outbreak, increase vaccination rates and provide support to needy states,” said the official.
The loss of the elimination state actually has no legal force, according to Dorit Reiss, an expert in vaccine policies at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It’s a blow to our achievements,” said Reiss. “Measles still reaches our country and always has people from abroad, but we don’t have cultivated national outbreaks. Losing the state means that this is no longer true.”
Without him, Marks said, people can find that they need to demonstrate their immunization state before traveling outside the United States
“Although that is trivial, it underlies the importance of controlling this outbreak and protecting our children,” Marks said.
Two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97% effective to prevent infection.
Dr. Buddy Creech, a doctor of pediatric infectious diseases at the Medical Center of the University of Vanderbilt in Nashville, said that communities with low vaccination rates have been previously saved from outbreaks, since the United States has not experienced the same level of measles activity observed 50 or 60 years ago, thanks to the MMR vaccine.
However, with the disease beginning to spread again in the United States, people may need to reconsider the risks of not vaccinating.
“I think that’s where people are challenged at this time,” Creech said. “People did not think of measles for maybe one generation or two, and made a calculation about vaccines because they heard or read something.”
Measles is dangerous, said Reiss, a fact that should be repeatedly recognized by government health officials.
“We need a clear message from our leaders that people should be vaccinated,” he said.
