Twenty of the cases are in children who have not been vaccinated. Eighteen of the cases are in children age 10 and younger.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Many parents are citing belief-based reasons, rather than medical reasons, for opting their kids out of immunizations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Doctors say the county has become an anti-vaxxer\u00a0‘hotspot’ and that the only way to curb the crisis is to ban\u00a0non-medical exemptions completely.<\/p>\n Officials have declared a public health emergency in Clark County in Washington state after confirming 23 cases of measles since January 1\u00a0<\/p>\n Clark County – which sits across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon – has led Oregon officials to warn residents about potential areas of exposure.<\/p>\n People infected with the virus have visited several locations including elementary schools, high schools, churches, urgent care facilities, a Costco and a Dollar Tree.<\/p>\n An infected person was at the Portland International Airport on January 7 – at Concourse D and the Delta Sky Lounge – and at baggage claim and the south end of the ticket counter on January 15, reported The Columbian<\/a>.<\/p>\n On January 11, someone infected with the virus attended a Portland Trailblazers home game.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Measles is a highly contagious infection caused by the measles virus.\u00a0<\/p>\n When someone with measles coughs, sneezes or talks, infected droplets are sprayed into the air, where other people can inhale them and are then infected.<\/p>\n Symptoms present themselves between 10 to 14 days after infection and include fever, cough, runny nose and a total-body skin rash.<\/p>\n Once common, the disease is now rare due to the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.<\/p>\n The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends children receive the first dose at 12 to 15 months old and the second dose at four to six years old.\u00a0<\/p>\n The vaccine is about 97 percent effective. But those who are unvaccinated have a 90 percent chance of catching measles if they breathe the virus in, the CDC says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Before the measles vaccine was available, more than 500,000 cases were diagnosed in the US every year, with about 500 annual deaths.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2018, 349 cases of measles were confirmed in 26 states and the District of Columbia, the CDC reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is the second-greatest number since measles was considered eradicated in the US in 2000.<\/p>\n Berlin, Warsaw and other urban cities could be struck down…<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Food recalls soar 10% in 5 years – with meat and poultry…<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n A report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) last week said measles has seen a 30 percent increase in cases around the world.<\/p>\n Between September 2017 and August 2018, WHO reported more than 41,000 cases with 40 deaths in EU member states.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n State records show that 77.4 percent of all public students in Clark County received all their vaccines, making it among the worst in Washington state, according to The Oregonian<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Additionally, nearly eight percent of children in the county were exempt from getting vaccines required for kindergarten for the 2017-18 school year.<\/p>\n A mere 1.2 percent were for medical reasons, while the rest were for ‘conscientious objector’ or ‘philosophical\/personal beliefs’.<\/p>\n This makes the area a ‘hotspot’ of the anti-vaccine movement, according to Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘Last year, I co-authored an article <\/a>identifying the hotpots of anti-vaxxers,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘One of the ground zero hotspots is Portland and adjoining Clark County.’\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He says the best way to stop this spread of cases is to get rid of non-medical vaccine exemptions. Washington and Oregon are two of 18 US states that allow this.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘Having all these unvaccinated children in Clark County is like pouring gasoline over a fire in the Portland area, and the gasoline is measles,’ said Dr Hotez.<\/p>\n ‘It’s this horrible self-inflicted wound that never should have happened.’\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He also says this is potentially just the beginning of the outbreak and that it could get far bigger.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘[The measles outbreak] in New York was just among the Orthodox Jewish community,’ Dr Hotez said, in reference to 177 measles cases that hit the Big Apple last year.<\/p>\n ‘Here, in the Portland area, it’s pervasive, so it could be worse and larger.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘And it’s expensive to hospitals and to local and public health officials to treat these cases and\u00a0to track down these cases and get people vaccinated.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A measles outbreak in an anti-vaccine community in Washington state has been declared a public health emergency by health officials. So far, 23 cases of the highly contagious disease have been confirmed in Clark County since January 1, according to a Clark County Public Health report published on Tuesday.\u00a0 Twenty of the cases are in Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Officials](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2019\/01\/23\/15\/8890826-6623389-image-a-11_1548256846692.jpg\")
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