There are now 51 confirmed cases of the highly contagious virus across California, three other states and Mexico, and the Orange County Health Care Agency said the reports of new cases “indicate the measles outbreak will continue to spread.”[...]
Officials say that many who have become ill were not vaccinated for measles. In the San Diego County cases alone, nine out of the 10 who fell ill did not get the measles vaccine. [...]
But health officials have long expressed fears that progress against measles was threatened by a growing anti-vaccination movement in the United States, based on parents’ fears that the vaccine causes autism -- a theory that has been thoroughly discredited by numerous scientific studies.
“The greatest threat to the U.S. vaccination program may now come from parents’ hesitancy to vaccinate their children,” Dr. Mark Grabowsky, a health official with the United Nations, wrote last year in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.-Pediatrics. "Although this so-called vaccine hesistancy has not become as widespread in the United States as it appears to have become in Europe, it is increasing."
“Many measles outbreaks can be traced to people refusing to be vaccinated; a recent large measles outbreak was attributable to a church advocating the refusal of measles vaccination.”
A Times analysis published last September reported that the rise in vaccine exemptions among kindergartners because of parents’ personal beliefs was most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, such as southern Orange County and the Santa Monica and Malibu areas. [...]
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