This is an update on the Minnesota measles story I posted the other day. Number is increasing.
From Fairwarning:
Seven children in Minnesota have come down with measles since February in an outbreak that public health officials are blaming, in part, on parents’ fears about having their youngsters vaccinated for the disease.
The seven children with measles have ranged in age from 7 months to four years, and they include two Somali children who had not been given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Officials said the vaccination rate has dropped in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, largely because of concerns about a possible link between the vaccine and autism.
One doctor estimates that as many as 70 percent of the Somalis he knows have not given their children the vaccine. “Every family will tell you that, ‘We’re not going to give our children the MMR. We’re afraid that they’re going to get autism,’” Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed told Minnesota Public Radio.
State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield said that before the current outbreak, there had been only six measles cases in Minnesota over the previous five years. Investigators have traced the outbreak to an infant who traveled to Kenya and returned home in the beginning of February.
Nationally, as the Associated Press reports, the most recent federal figures show only 140 reported cases of measles across the country in 2008. Worldwide, however, the disease strikes nearly 10 million people, and kills 200,000, annually.
I thought the refugee resettlement agencies were supposed to make sure Somali kids got vaccinated.