[ad_1]
New York City health officials on Monday announced a new wave of crackdown on yeshivas in a Brooklyn neighborhood, allowing unvaccinated students to attend a school in the middle of a measles crisis.
The Ministry of Health had already ordered Jewish academies of some postal codes to send children home who were not completely immune, but some schools have flouted the rules.
The agency has now extended the ban to all yeshivas in the Williamsburg district, warning that those who do not would be "liable to a fine or eventual closure of the school."
Since the beginning of the epidemic in the city of October, 285 people – most of them children – have contracted the virus, highly contagious but preventable. Forty cases came from a single yeshiva who did not comply with city orders, officials said.
Twenty-one patients had to be hospitalized, which contradicts the anti-vaxxer argument that measles is not a serious illness.
Officials said immunization rates in some Orthodox Jewish communities were lower due to religious exemptions, although many religious leaders urge their followers to be vaccinated.
The Brooklyn epidemic is the largest, but there is also a significant epidemic in the Jewish community of Rockland County, New York, where a judge recently quashed an order barring unvaccinated children from traveling to all places public. In addition, Michigan health authorities are trying to stem an outbreak in Oakland County, another Orthodox community, where the number of cases has been raised to 41 this week.
Another outbreak in Washington State, centered on the Slav community, amounts to 74 cases and no new infections have been reported in several weeks.
Some of the outbreaks were caused by trips to and from Israel, where the disease spread to thousands of people.
However, health officials said that a growing anti-vaxxer movement, fueled by conspiracy theories denied, was also behind the return of a disease that had been eradicated in 2002.
The virus can live in the air for two hours after a single sneeze or cough, making it easier to spread in communities where vaccination rates are low or in many babies who have not yet received MMR vaccine.
Health officials in New York are particularly concerned that the Brooklyn epidemic continues to gain momentum as Passover and family planning meetings approach.
[ad_2]
Source link