Unidentified woman dies in Washington.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Health officials on Thursday announced the first U.S. death stemming from measles in 12 years.
The woman, who died in the spring, was most likely to have been exposed to the virus in a health facility in Washington state during an outbreak there, according to The Washington Post. A later autopsy confirmed she had an undetected measles infection, the Washington State Department of Health said in a statement. The official cause of death was announced as “pneumonia due to measles.”
The woman was at a Clallam County health facility “at the same time as a person who later developed a rash and was contagious for measles,” the health department statement read. “The woman had several other health conditions and was on medications that contributed to a suppressed immune system. She didn’t have some of the common symptoms of measles such as a rash, so the infection wasn’t discovered until after her death.”
A spokesman for the health department told AFP that the woman’s death was not related to the outbreak this year linked to a Disney theme park in California.
“The type of measles the woman died of “matched the outbreak in the local county here, but that outbreak strain was not a match for the Disney outbreak,” he said.
It is not currently known whether the woman was vaccinated, but that may not have prevented her from catching the illness since she was immune-compromised, reported Forbes.
The woman’s death was a preventable, but predictable, consequence of plummeting vaccination rates, Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development in Houston, told USA Today.
Measles has become resurgent in recent years as significant numbers of parents have opted against fully vaccinating their children. Last year, 644 people contracted the virus, despite the virus being declared eradicated from the United States in 2000.
There have been 176 cases of measles in the United States so far this year, with 117 of those cases linked to the Disney outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We know that even when measles is endemic,” Dr. Mark Schleiss, professor of pediatrics and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at the University of Minnesota, told Forbes, “we can prevent deaths through immunization.”