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(NBC) – A measles epidemic raging in Europe could be a harbinger of what could happen in the US if something does not change soon, experts say.
So far this year, there have been 41,000 cases in Europe and 40 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. The European experience may offer a window into how quickly parents decide not to vaccinate their children, he warned.
Because measles is relatively rare in the United States, many Americans have no idea of the scary effect of the disease and its staggering contagiousness.
Many forget that measles is not just a childhood disease.
Silvia Rosetti, who lives in Rome, still has nightmares about contracting measles while she was 32 weeks pregnant in 2017. When Rosetti, now 41, needed to be diagnosed with the disease. a vaccine against measles, she did not think about the risk of exposure she got pregnant for the first time. She was healthy and ecstatic in the thought of having her first child. But then she caught measles and the symptoms appeared hastily: fever, cough and congestion so severe that she could barely breathe.
"The situation got worse, so they decided to do a caesarean section," Rosetti said. "I went to quarantine for five days. I could not see my baby. His newborn son, Nathan, was also quarantined until the doctors determined he was not infected. Rosetti developed pneumonia as a complication of her measles and was so weak that she could no longer get up.
"And I even had a rash in my eyes, so I could not see anything," Rosetti told NBC News.
Rosetti finally recovered. His baby, Nathan is now a year old and has received all his vaccinations.
"If you do the vaccination, you love yourself, you love your sons and everyone," she said. "You protect everyone, it's not fair to me or my son."
Rosetti is one of more than 2,000 people in Italy who have already been diagnosed with measles this year.
"We are in a very serious situation," said Dr. Alberto Villani, a physician specializing in infectious diseases in children's and pediatric hospital Bambino Gesù and president of the Italian Society of Pediatrics. "People are dying of measles. It was incredible five or ten years ago.
Even in England, which had been declared measles-free by the World Health Organization a year ago, cases are multiplying.
Experts say the reason is that in Europe, many parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children. "This is the main factor responsible for epidemics," said Anca Paduraru of the European Commission in Brussels. "It is unacceptable to have in the 21st century diseases that should have been and could have been eradicated."
To prevent epidemics, at least 95% of the population must have received at least two doses of measles vaccine, the WHO said. Some parts of Europe are less than 70%.
The measles vaccine has been available in the United States since 1963 and is now routinely given to children in combination with mumps and rubella vaccines. The effectiveness of the vaccine led the federal authorities to declare measles eradication in the United States in 2000. Before the vaccine, there were 3 to 4 million cases per year, according to the Center for Control and Prevention. diseases.
But the success of vaccines has at least partly failed.
Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles, says many parents are not familiar with the ravages of measles because there have been few cases in the United States. Since the vaccine became widely available.
"People do not see them and they forget them or think that diseases do not exist anymore," Klausner said. "They do not realize that their child is at risk for meningitis with measles, encephalitis and permanent brain damage."
As in Europe, the number of unvaccinated children in the United States has increased in some parts of the country, said Dr. Albert W. Wu, internist and professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"It's a real setup for a disaster because measles is incredibly contagious," Wu said. "This is an accident waiting to happen."
Why, when vaccines have been so successful in eliminating the scourges of smallpox and polio, have parents become so skeptical about them?
"What's happening in Europe is happening now in the US – on a smaller scale at this point," said Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Texas Children's Hospital's Vaccine Development Center at Baylor College. of Medicine and author of "Vaccines Did not Cause Rachel's Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Specialist, Pediatrician and Autism Dad.
The problem is the plethora of erroneous information online, said Hotez. "The anti-vaccine groups have made a very strategic use of the Internet and social media," he added. "It is estimated that over 400 anti-vaccine websites currently exist, and when you insert" vaccine "into a search engine, it is almost inevitable that an anti-vaccine website will appear."
And it's not just the Internet, Hotez said. "There are now political action committees in several states, including Texas," he added.
It's unclear exactly what motivates the anti-vaccine movement, Hotez said. But "there is an element of the anti-vaccine movement that peddles alternative therapies and earns money with fictitious treatments," he said. "And there is one element that has been linked to different political groups. In Texas, the main anti-vaccine lobby prefers to use vulgar terms like "medical freedom" or "medical choice".
The anti-vaxxers have had such an impact that "now there is a terrible vulnerability in states like Texas and the Pacific Northwest," Hotez said. "People forget that before the vaccination of children, we had between 400 and 700 measles deaths each year in the United States."
At the moment, there is no public relations campaign to explain why vaccines are so important, Hotez said. "It's a handful of academics who, like me, want to go out and tell their personal stories," he said. "And we are clearly surpassed."
Hotez said he would not be surprised to see a major measles outbreak in the United States this year.
This could help people understand what's at stake, Wu added, adding, "I'm afraid the outbreak is really going off in the US before we start to witness a reversal of that anti feeling. -vaccine."
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