The parents of a six-year-old girl who died from measles have maintained their decision not to vaccinate their child.
Measles is a potentially fatal disease that is also highly preventable with vaccinations. Cases in West Texas are still on the rise two months after the outbreak began, and local public health officials predict the virus will continue to spread for at least several months.
As of Friday, the outbreak in Texas had reached 309 cases and resulted in one measles-related death, while in New Mexico, there had been 42 cases and one death. Forty-two people have been hospitalized in the two states.
Texas’ outbreak, which has largely spread in undervaccinated Mennonite communities, could last a year, according to studies of how measles previously spread in Amish communities in the United States.
According to Katherine Wells, director of the Lubbock, Texas, public health department, these studies revealed outbreaks that lasted six to seven months. Lubbock hospitals have treated the majority of the outbreak’s patients, and the public health department is closely involved in the response.
The child’s parents appeared in a video released by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group chaired by former Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The parents, who spoke a dialect of German, explained how the child appeared to be suffering from classic symptoms, sometimes through a translation. The fever persisted, and she was rushed to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
She was then taken to the ICU and put on a ventilator before dying.
The parents’ other four children had milder cases of measles, which they attribute to the untested treatments from Veritas Wellness, a holistic clinic in Lubbock, Texas. Dr. Ben Edwards treated the family.
When asked if they still felt the same way about the MMR vaccine, the anti-vaccine group responded, “Absolutely not take the MMR [vaccine].” The measles weren’t particularly bad. [The other children] got over it fairly quickly. “And Dr. Edwards was there for us.”
The outbreak includes 14 Texas counties, two New Mexico counties, and four probable cases in Oklahoma, the first two of which are “associated” with the West Texas and New Mexico outbreaks, according to health officials.
Measles is one of the world’s most infectious diseases. The way it spreads makes it particularly difficult to control, and outbreaks can have multiple peaks, according to Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.
