Monday, March 10, 2025

Hazardous to your health REFjr @HHS has a cure for the accelerating measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico


Headline:  Your Local Epidemiologist, 3/10/2025

It’s very hard to say whether we are at the beginning or middle of the outbreak, mostly because I don’t trust the numbers. Several signs suggest substantial underreporting: 
  • Death ratio. We’ve seen two deaths so far, yet only 228 cases have been reported. Measles typically kills 1 in 1,000 unvaccinated individuals. They were either extremely unlucky, or there are more cases than reported. 
  • Very sick hospitalized patients. By the time these hospitalized children get to the hospital, they are very sick, meaning parents may be delaying care. The second measles fatality (which was an unvaccinated adult) never even went to the hospital. 
  • Epidemiologists are encountering resistance to case investigations. 
  • We don’t just have a murky numerator (case count)—we also have a murky denominator (population size). The community at the center of this outbreak is likely far larger than official U.S. Census figures suggest. 
I wager the “true” count is much higher than reported. A CDC response team is now on the ground, working directly with local and state epidemiologists to help get this under control.


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