HEALTH - Think Ebola is Scary, There Are Others

"Ebola sounds scary, but these diseases are the real health threat" PBS NewsHour 10/22/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  The government’s latest steps illustrate again just how much anxiety remains about the prospect of Ebola’s spread.  But as public health officials continue to emphasize, the real risk to most Americans remains small.

In fact, there are a number of other illnesses that continue to pose bigger threats.

We outlined some of those concerns online, and it attracted a great deal of public interest.  So we decided to provide that context on our broadcast as well.

Hari Sreenivasan recorded this conversation in our New York studios.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  We get more information and perspective on this now from Dr. William Schaffner.  He is an infectious disease expert joining us from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

So, first off, there were quite a few cases that we heard out just a few months ago about Enterovirus D68.  This is something that was discovered in the ’60s, but this is really first outbreak that we have had.

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, Vanderbilt University Medical Center:  Yes, Hari, it’s a very large outbreak.  It’s run across the entire country.

Children, many of them, have been affected.  And, of course, there are some children who had difficulty breathing and asthma attacks.  And now there’s even the question about whether this virus is capable of producing a paralytic illness.  That’s still under investigation.  But that was a big surprise that came upon us, yes.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  OK.

And then something that we thought was long gone, measles, we have kind of seen a reemergence of measles, almost 600 cases this year.

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER:  Yes.  Can you imagine that?

And that’s because there’s still measles out in the world, but our parents, many of them, are withholding their children from vaccination.  And so when someone from — with measles comes into this country, it can spread among our own children, causing a whole lot of illness, illness that we thought was long gone.

And, actually, you know, before we had measles vaccine, measles caused 400 to 500 deaths of our children each year.  We’re letting down our guard a little bit there.