Measles outbreak tied to Texas megachurch sickens 21
JoNel Aleccia NBC News


An outbreak of measles tied to a Texas megachurch where ministers have questioned vaccination has sickened at least 21 people, including a 4-month-old infant -- and it’s expected to grow, state and federal health officials said.

“There’s likely a lot more susceptible people,” said Dr. Jane Seward, the deputy director for the viral diseases division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sixteen people -- nine children and seven adults -- ranging in age from 4 months to 44 years had come down with the highly contagious virus in Tarrant County, Texas, as of Monday. Another five cases are part of the outbreak in nearby Denton County.

All of the cases are linked to the Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, where a visitor who’d traveled to Indonesia became infected with measles – and then returned to the U.S., spreading it to the largely unvaccinated church community, said Russell Jones, the Texas state epidemiologist.

“We have a pocket of people that weren’t immunized,” said Jones, noting that vaccination rates typically hover above the 98 percent range in his county.

Infections spread to the congregation, the staff and a day care center at Eagle Mountain International.

The ill people were all linked to the church that is a division of Kenneth Copeland Ministries. That group advocates faith-healing and advises people to “first seek the Wisdom of God” and then appropriate medical attention in matters of health, according to an online statement.

Terri Pearsons, a senior pastor of Eagle Mountain International Church and Copeland’s daughter, previously said she had concerns about a possible ties between early childhood vaccines and autism, a position that has been refuted by health officials.

In the wake of the measles outbreak, however, Pearsons has urged followers to get vaccinated and the church has held several vaccination clinics, according to its website. Health officials said the church administration has been very cooperative in the outbreak investigation. Pearsons did not return an email from NBC News seeking comment.

“We continue to follow up on pending and confirmed cases to help in any way we can to keep the outbreak contained,” a church statement said. “We ask that others join us in prayers over this outbreak.”

Health authorities notified the church of the first cases on Aug. 14; Texas state health officials issued a warning about the outbreak on Aug. 16. In the meantime, hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000 contacts could have been affected by potentially infected people, Seward said.

“In this community, these cases so far are all in people who refused vaccination for themselves and their children,” she added.

Of the 16 cases in Tarrant County, 11 did not have any measles vaccination. The others may have had at least one measles vaccination, but they couldn’t produce documentation, county officials said.

The outbreak raises to 159 the total number of confirmed measles cases in the U.S. this year. The disease that once killed 500 people a year in the U.S. and hospitalized 48,000 had been considered eradicated after a vaccine introduced in 1963. Cases now show up typically when an unvaccinated person contracts the disease abroad and spreads it upon return to the U.S.

Five previous cases in Texas this year were far higher than typical years, but don’t appear to be related to the current outbreak, state officials said.

Measles is so contagious that 90 percent of people who are not immune to the disease or vaccinated against it will get sick, health officials warned. It is a respiratory disease spread by sneezing or coughing. The virus can live in the air or on infected surfaces for up to two hours. Symptoms include fever, cough, runny nose and sore throat, plus a characteristic red rash that starts on the face or hairline and spreads to the rest of the body. It can take eight days to two weeks after exposure before an infected person develops symptoms.

Health officials recommend that children receive a Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine at age 12 months and again at 4 to 6 years. Unless adults have previously had measles or are immunized, health officials say they should be vaccinated.

“We just want people to be aware and well-informed about the risks of the disease, especially when they travel abroad,” Seward said.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/measles-outbreak-tied-texas-megachurch-sickens-21-8C11009315

Maybe the Lord din't say it, but at least Pearsons urged people to get vaccinated.

I have noticed more churches that believe in "healing" have been urging their congregations to seek medical care even while they pray...
I am glad Pearsons had the common sense to tell her congregation to get vaccinated....

Re the vaccination-autism link: I have heard several people voice concern about this even though science has refuted this concern--for sure the diagnosis of autism is on the rise....in my small circle of friends I know 5 people diagnosed with either Aspberger's or Autism: I'm talkig close circle of friends, not acquaintances... That's a lot of people in that small circle to have that diagnosis....

I wonder if the vaccines have changed any over the years? Has something been added, or taken away? There could be a link. Then again, it could be environmental. Baby formula, food additives, GM foods.....on and on the "suspicious" list grows.

Today when we take anything into our bodies, it's a crap shoot. Can't trust the government to properly oversee, can't trust the drug companies to care or doctors to research meds, can't trust the corporate farms or the food manufacturers to look at anything but the bottom line. It's not pretty.

Expanding the definition of autism is the main reason, IMO.

Good catch oskar. That didn't even occur to me and you are probably right.

And there's another reason.

A child with an autism diagnosis may quality for disability benefits from birth to age 18 under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. The SSI program is based on a lower family income allowable limit.

Ollie's 12 year old grandson gets $900 a month.

Schools love autism as they get extra funding for special needs kids. That they routinely use the funds to plug budget holes is a separate matter.

I agree expanding the definition plays a big role ~ and the accompanying medicating expansion does too ~

Sooz

In Texas and beyond, hot spots for vaccine refusers alarm officials
JoNel Aleccia NBC News

16 hours ago

An outbreak of measles among unimmunized members of a Texas megachurch is fueling new health worries about pockets of vaccine-wary parents -- just as more than 50 million public school kids head back to class across the nation.

More possible measles cases are being reviewed in Tarrant County, Texas, where at least 21 people have been sickened this month at the Eagle Mountain International Church, whose ministers have been critical of vaccination. Local officials say several more cases of infections with fever and rash have been reported, but not confirmed.

“It’s concerning. It’s something we jump on,” said Russell Jones, a Texas state epidemiologist who’s been tracking the situation. “It could get into the schools.”

Public health officials say that the northeast Texas outbreak is just the latest in a small but growing number of places -- think San Diego, Calif., Boone and Hamilton counties, Ind., and, most recently, Brooklyn, N.Y. -- where vaccine resistance has sickened children and put the wider community at risk for potentially deadly infectious diseases.

“The rate of change has sort of accelerated,” said Dr. Saad Omer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies clusters of vaccine exemptions in public schools.

“Tarrant County was not on my radar,” he added.

He’s more familiar with places such as Marin County, Calif., where rates of new kindergarteners excused from mandatory shots nearly doubled from 4.2 percent in 2005 to 7.8 percent at the start of last year, county figures show. There, at the small New Village School in Sausalito, 74 percent of entering kindergarteners said no to vaccinations.

“Like-minded people end up creating pockets of non-vaccinated or under-vaccinated communities,” explained Dr. Ari Brown, an Austin, Texas, pediatrician and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “They kind of seek each other out because they have similar philosophies.”

But vaccine critics say that distrust of the drugs -- and of the public health community that pushes them -- is behind rising rates of vaccine rejection across the country.

“These are pharmaceutical products that carry a risk of death or injury that can vary according to the individuals,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Va.

Critics object to vaccines because of fears about safety, worries about the effects of injecting young children with dozens of doses of vaccines by age 6 and worries about possible links with other diseases, including autism, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked.

Public health officials, however, say there’s no question that the risk of vaccination is far outweighed by the benefit of immunization. Risks of vaccine side effects or failure are possible but rare, and they’re much lower than the risks associated with disease, said Omer.

In the decade before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, between 3 million and 4 million people in the U.S. were infected each year, 48,000 were hospitalized and 400 to 500 died. Another 1,000 developed chronic disabilities, CDC says.

Domestic cases of the disease were considered eradicated in 2000, but outbreaks continue because of imported infections brought back by travelers from areas where measles remains common.

The Texas megachurch outbreak was sparked by a non-vaccinated visitor who was infected in Indonesia and then returned to expose unvaccinated church members, staffers -- and children in a day care center. In the wider community, more than 98 percent of kids are immunized and less than 1 percent are exempt, county officials say. But the congregation of unvaccinated people allowed the disease to catch hold.

“When you hang out with other people who don’t vaccinate, you’re hanging out in the wrong herd,” said Brown, a reference to herd immunity, the necessary level of protection that keeps a disease from spreading within a community.

Church leaders, including Kenneth Copeland and his daughter, Terri Pearsons, senior pastor at Eagle Mountain, have advocated faith-healing and questioned vaccines in the past. After the outbreak began in mid-August, Pearsons has urged church members to get vaccinated and held immunization clinics.

When more than 10 percent of a certain community opts out of vaccinations, it leaves others at risk, particularly those too vulnerable for immunization, or those for whom a vaccine doesn’t work or wears off.

For some diseases, such as mumps, herd immunity can drop to as low as about 75 percent and still offer wider protection. But other diseases, such as the highly contagious measles or pertussis, known as whooping cough, require collective immunity of up to 94 percent to keep everyone safe, according to the CDC.

To be clear, the vast majority of U.S. parents do vaccinate their kids, latest federal health statistics show. Nationwide, only about 1.8 percent of the more than 4.2 million kindergarteners who entered public school last fall were exempted from laws that require that they get shots to protect against what once were the deadliest diseases of childhood: measles, mumps, rubella, polio. (Homeschooled children aren’t included in the count.)

But exemption rates also vary widely among states, from 0.6 percent in Alabama to 4 percent in Alaska and Colorado and 6.4 percent in Oregon, which leads the nation, CDC figures show.

Rates are highest in the 20 states that allow for exemptions based not only on medical and religious grounds, but also on “personal beliefs.” And within those states they can vary even more. In Oregon, at least four counties have double-digit exemption rates ranging from 12.6 percent in Curry County to 15.2 percent in Wallowa County.

In states where it has been easy to obtain exemptions -- with a simple signature, for instance -- rates of exemption have risen sharply, according to a 2012 study by Omer and colleagues. Between 2005 and 2011, the non-medical exemption rate in 13 “easy” states rose to 3.3 percent, an average annual increase of 13 percent, he found.

Some states are trying to change that trend, making it more difficult to obtain exemptions. In Washington state, where kindergarten exemption rates peaked at 7.6 percent in 2008, public health officials changed the school paperwork two years ago, separating the vaccine record from the exemption form, said Dr. Ed Marcuse, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington.

“At the same time we did that, we changed the law. In order to be exempt, you had to be counseled about vaccine-preventable diseases,” he said. The child's physician has to sign a form proving that the counseling took place.

The point was not to "simply put in hassles,” Marcuse said, pointing out that some states require notarization of exemption forms. “We wanted very much to be certain that parents made as thoughtful and well-informed a decision as possible."

The effort appears to be paying off. Kindergarten exemption rates fell from 6.2 percent in 2010 to 4.6 percent in 2012 after the initiative, state records show. Now, Oregon and California have passed similar laws bolstering requirements for exemption.

The goal, Marcuse said, is to enact policies that balance the inherent conflict in the vaccine debate between private choice and public good.

“It’s not so simple as ‘Let’s wipe out these pockets of resistance,'” said Marcuse. “Let’s help people make decisions that are both in their personal interest and in the interest of the community.”