Excerpt
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): We want to turn now to another story that’s gotten a lot less attention this week — recent outbreaks of measles on both the East and West Coasts. It’s part of a larger story about how infectious diseases that had all but disappeared in the U.S. are now reappearing. For more, we’re joined by Stephen Morse, he’s a professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. So nearly 20 cases of measles in New York, but nationwide the number of measles cases according to the C.D.C. was up three times last year. So why is this happening?
STEPHEN MORSE, Columbia University: Well measles is vaccine preventable and so to a large extent it’s because of people who are not being immunized or are too young to be immunized. Normally we start recommending immunization at about one year. But for example we had an outbreak last summer in Brooklyn largely because the decision in those communities was to wait before immunizing the children and vaccinate them later, and so some of the younger children got infected.
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