Measles Vaccine at 50 Years: Still Not Over the Finish Line
Measles Vaccine at 50 Years: Still Not Over the Finish Line
Hello. This is Paul Auwaerter speaking from the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for Medscape Infectious Diseases.
It has been 50 years since the licensure of the measles vaccine in 1963 in the United States. The vaccine was derived from work by Thomas Peebles and John Enders, who discovered and refined the virus and vaccine. Then, later in the 1960s and early 1970s, Maurice Hilleman incorporated it into the remarkable MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine at Merck.
Before measles immunization, measles was a highly contagious illness that caused, on average, 48,000 hospitalizations a year in the United States and resulted in 7000 children with significant seizure disorder, roughly 1000 with permanent brain damage, some related to subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), and about 500 deaths. With immunization, these rates fell dramatically in most of the developing world, such that by the year 2000, indigenous measles had been eradicated in the United States, with only rare imported cases.
Speaking from a personal perspective, I started studying measles in 1991 in the laboratory of Diane Griffin. Twenty years ago, the most pressing matters were efforts to enhance immunization in infants in the developing world, where it still accounted for many deaths, perhaps to prevent those babies from contracting measles after maternal antibodies waned. In addition, we wanted to develop ways to maintain a cold-chain delivery of the measles vaccine to low-resource settings.
Where are we now? In 2013, the measles vaccine remains extraordinarily effective. In 2008 in the United States, however, we saw an outbreak of indigenous measles with subsequent outbreaks such that in 2011, 222 cases had been reported in the US. Since the autumn of 2012, in the United Kingdom, there have been outbreaks of measles in Northeastern England and Wales, totaling more than 750 cases. These outbreaks are occurring primarily in unimmunized children, mostly children ages 5-14 years.
This is exactly the age that you might predict as a consequence of the erroneous Lancet article by Wakefield and colleagues that linked the MMR vaccine with autism (a hypothesis that has been soundly discredited along with the primary author). However, the ramifications are coming home to roost now; many parents became concerned that vaccines may lead to developmental delays in their children, and they sought not to immunize them. Thus, we are seeing these unimmunized children now, predictably prone to measles.
Hello. This is Paul Auwaerter speaking from the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for Medscape Infectious Diseases.
It has been 50 years since the licensure of the measles vaccine in 1963 in the United States. The vaccine was derived from work by Thomas Peebles and John Enders, who discovered and refined the virus and vaccine. Then, later in the 1960s and early 1970s, Maurice Hilleman incorporated it into the remarkable MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine at Merck.
Before measles immunization, measles was a highly contagious illness that caused, on average, 48,000 hospitalizations a year in the United States and resulted in 7000 children with significant seizure disorder, roughly 1000 with permanent brain damage, some related to subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), and about 500 deaths. With immunization, these rates fell dramatically in most of the developing world, such that by the year 2000, indigenous measles had been eradicated in the United States, with only rare imported cases.
Speaking from a personal perspective, I started studying measles in 1991 in the laboratory of Diane Griffin. Twenty years ago, the most pressing matters were efforts to enhance immunization in infants in the developing world, where it still accounted for many deaths, perhaps to prevent those babies from contracting measles after maternal antibodies waned. In addition, we wanted to develop ways to maintain a cold-chain delivery of the measles vaccine to low-resource settings.
Where are we now? In 2013, the measles vaccine remains extraordinarily effective. In 2008 in the United States, however, we saw an outbreak of indigenous measles with subsequent outbreaks such that in 2011, 222 cases had been reported in the US. Since the autumn of 2012, in the United Kingdom, there have been outbreaks of measles in Northeastern England and Wales, totaling more than 750 cases. These outbreaks are occurring primarily in unimmunized children, mostly children ages 5-14 years.
This is exactly the age that you might predict as a consequence of the erroneous Lancet article by Wakefield and colleagues that linked the MMR vaccine with autism (a hypothesis that has been soundly discredited along with the primary author). However, the ramifications are coming home to roost now; many parents became concerned that vaccines may lead to developmental delays in their children, and they sought not to immunize them. Thus, we are seeing these unimmunized children now, predictably prone to measles.
