United States: Measles cases that surfaced this year in at least three states of the US have been linked to visits in Florida, according to the investigators from the federal and state governments.
The reports also shed light on some of the primary infections that caused an eruption of the highly infectious disease.
Links of measles cases with Florida
Florida’s health department believed that the families of the previous cases this year from Indiana and Louisiana had crossed paths in the state, as suggested by communication between local investigators and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which began at the end of February.
Last year, the Louisiana governor reported the state’s earliest measles cases out of the New Orleans metro area resulted from out-of-state travel but did not say which country.
In 2019, a patient who recently visited an outlet in Florida got sickened with measles in Ohio. The tertiary case infection had not otherwise been linked to the other two cases directly.
Megan Gumke, an epidemiologist for the Florida Department of Health, stated, “As mentioned, we’ve had an Ohio case that visited [redacted] Florida as well as a case of our own in the region, so definitely curious if there is a connection,” as CBS News reported.
Florida is not the epicenter- Florida officials
The spokesperson for Orlando Health also refused to comment, instead referring to the health authorities of Florida. Grant Kemp, spokesman for the Measles Department of Health in Florida, said that it was misleading to introduce Florida as the epicenter of outbreaks between measles cases when other states also reported infections.
Kemp added, “When communicable diseases are identified in out-of-state residents, that information is transferred to the state where they reside and are not classified as a Florida case,” as CBS News reported.
The cases that were happening in Orlando also were “completely unrelated” to the outbreak of measles at an elementary school in Florida’s Broward County at the beginning of this year, said Kemp
First off, the Broward County case beginning was about measles in a 9-year-old who was not vaccinated because of the religious exemption, so many other suspected cases came out with students who were unvaccinated at the same school.
The kid has not traveled there lately. The number of cases later on reached nine in the Florida county of Broward before officials decided to pronounce an end to the outbreak.
Plea for vaccination by officials
It follows public health officials who have made an urgent call on the unvaccinated people in the US not to travel abroad without having had an injection to shield them from measles, CBS News reported.
In January 2024, the United States reached an unfortunate high point in the 2024 measles epidemic, which was fueled by the fact that more cases had been confirmed in the first three months of the year than in the entirety of the previous year.