Latest news with #OrthodoxJewish


WIRED
3 days ago
- Health
- WIRED
Can US Measles Outbreaks Be Stopped?
Jul 16, 2025 2:42 PM The US almost lost its measles elimination status once. Lessons from that episode suggest it will be more difficult to avoid doing so now. The US is experiencing its worst year for measles in over three decades, with more than 1,300 cases in 40 states as of July 16. Cases were almost as high in 2019, putting the country's measles elimination status at risk. Six years ago, health officials were able to stop the spread. But amid growing public backlash against vaccines, many of the tactics used then may not work now. Measles elimination means there has been no continuous transmission in a country for longer than 12 months. That almost happened in the 2019 outbreak, which largely affected Orthodox Jewish populations in New York City and some surrounding counties. In fall 2018, US travelers returning from Israel tested positive for measles. The disease quickly spread throughout close-knit communities, especially among children, due to low vaccination rates. While the statewide measles vaccination rate for school-age children was 98 percent the previous school year, vaccination coverage in schools in the outbreak area was only 77 percent. Because measles is highly contagious, a 95 percent vaccination rate is needed to protect a community from the disease. As a result, the majority of measles cases occurred in individuals 18 and under, nearly 86 percent of whom were known to be unvaccinated. Some of those people developed severe complications, including pneumonia, and nearly 8 percent were hospitalized. The current surge is being fueled by an outbreak that started in an undervaccinated Mennonite community in West Texas. Cases have since spread to other Texas counties, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Two children in Texas with no underlying conditions and one adult in New Mexico have died this year as a result of measles. All were unvaccinated. 'There are definitely parallels. What we saw in New York was very much the result of years and years of spread of misinformation and disinformation around the safety of vaccines,' says Neil Vora, executive director of Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition and previously a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who helped respond to the 2019 outbreak. Cases eventually burned out in New York after a months-long effort that included both traditional public health approaches and policy changes at the local and state level. 'You need to take the first case seriously, because it's like kindling. You never know when that fire is just going to break out,' says Oxiris Barbot, the current president and CEO of the United Hospital Fund, who served as New York City's health commissioner from 2018 to 2020. As the disease spread, Barbot realized the city health department would need to go to the source of transmission, largely the Orthodox Jewish schools in affected neighborhoods. Working with school administrators, they reviewed vaccination records to identify unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children. Following an exposure, those children were prohibited from attending school and childcare for 21 days, the incubation period for measles. Similar measures were taken in some counties outside the city. 'It took a lot of staff time, a lot of leg work,' Barbot says. In one school, a contagious child led to more than 25 infections in other students and further spread outside the school. She says the health department was 'heavily involved' in making sure schools were abiding by the quarantine measures.' Health officials also worked to combat misinformation. A Jewish anti-vaccine group called Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children's Health, or PEACH, distributed a 40-page anti-vaccination booklet titled 'The Vaccine Safety Handbook' that contained conspiracy theories and inaccurate information, including the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. In response, the city health department mailed booklets that provided accurate and religiously relevant information about vaccines to thousands of households in affected neighborhoods and launched a campaign to combat vaccine myths. 'We were consistently delivering the same message that was backed by science and that gave our community partners the legitimacy with which to engage their family, their friends, and their neighbors in countering the myths and disinformation that was being shared,' Barbot says. When those efforts weren't enough on their own, New York City used its public health authority to increase vaccination rates. In April 2019, about six months after the first cases appeared, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency, requiring individuals living, working, or going to school in affected zip codes to be vaccinated against measles. Those who didn't comply could be fined. In Rockland County, unvaccinated people under the age of 18 were banned from public places for 30 days. That summer, the New York legislature also changed statewide vaccination requirements to remove religious exemptions, which were previously allowed. The change applied to public, private, and religious schools. As a result of the efforts in New York, tens of thousands of vaccine doses were administered. In one affected Brooklyn neighborhood, the percentage of children who received at least one dose of MMR vaccine increased from less than 80 percent to 91 percent between October 2018 and September 2019. A modeling study by a researcher at Columbia University found that without these measures, numbers of infections and hospitalizations could have been 10 times higher. Those efforts won't necessarily map neatly onto the current measles outbreak. Vaccine requirements would likely face pushback in conservative states like Texas, especially since mistrust around vaccines has risen since the Covid-19 pandemic. (In fact, in May, Texas lawmakers passed a bill to make it easier for parents to seek vaccine exemptions for their children. That law goes into effect September 1.) 'Different approaches are going to have to be tailored for the unique needs of those specific areas. It's not a one-size-fits all approach,' Vora says. In Texas, the Department of State Health Services carried out a comprehensive paid media campaign that included online, broadcast, billboard, and on-site ads in businesses in two phases from March to June to encourage measles vaccination. The department was especially focused on areas where measles was spreading and areas at greater risk of an outbreak. This was in addition to the department's usual vaccination campaigns, a spokesperson tells WIRED via email. Zach Holbrooks, executive director for the South Plains Public Health District in Texas, which covers Gaines, Yoakum, Terry and Dawson counties, says his department had mobile vaccine and testing clinics operating in all four counties from February until May, when cases started to decline. Gaines County, which has reported more than half of the cases in Texas, is no longer an active outbreak county as of July 8. 'Anytime we saw cases popping up where they hadn't been before, we would get with our state partners and deploy resources to those areas,' Holbrooks says. 'All we can do is supply opportunities for people to get screened or vaccinated. It's really up to them to take advantage of those services.' In Gaines County, 313 people were vaccinated as part of those efforts, although Holbrooks says he was hoping to see more. His district tried to get the word out about vaccination with a mobile billboard truck that drove around the region. They also worked with the state and CDC to translate vaccine communication into German to target the Mennonite community. 'The messaging was out there,' Holbrooks says. But he thinks lingering mistrust from the Covid-19 pandemic has led to more people rejecting vaccines and public health guidance. 'Sometimes attitudes and feelings about vaccines are pretty hardwired in people, and it's hard to overcome the negative beliefs that they have.' It's also been challenging to get people to comply with the 21-day quarantine rule. He received reports of kids with measles being out in public with their parents. 'A lot of people didn't take it seriously,' he says of the quarantine period. Another hurdle is that many people are traveling for summer vacations, which can easily spread disease and make it harder to trace the chains of transmission. There are signs, however, that disease spread may be slowing down. The number of new measles cases has been declining in recent weeks, according to the CDC. Still, with pockets of low vaccination across the country, transmission could continue throughout the rest of the year, and future outbreaks are likely. Building back trust in vaccines and public health will take time. Barbot says consistent messaging at the federal, state, and local levels is one step in that direction. While current US Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tepidly endorsed the measles vaccine, he has also made the false claim that protection from the vaccine wanes quickly and has promoted vitamin A as a treatment for measles. While vitamin A is often given to children with nutritional deficiencies who get measles, it doesn't kill the virus. 'It's not too late,' Barbot says. 'With an all-out effort we can avoid losing that [elimination] status.'


Middle East Eye
5 days ago
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Haredi party threatens to leave Netanyahu's coalition military service exemption law is not presented
A branch of the United Torah Judaism party threatened on Monday to leave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition government unless it is presented with a draft of a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service, multiple news sources reported. Degel Hatorah is giving the government 24 hours to make a decision. Ultra-Orthodox party Shas is also reportedly threatening to resign from the government within days. A yeshiva is an Orthodox Jewish college.


Japan Today
09-07-2025
- Health
- Japan Today
U.S. having its worst year for measles in more than three decades
By DEVI SHASTRI The U.S. is having its worst year for measles spread in more than three decades, with a total of 1,288 cases nationally and another six months to go in 2025. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that the national case count surpassed 2019, when there were 1,274 cases for the year and the country almost lost its status of having eliminated the vaccine-preventable illness. That could happen this year if the virus has nonstop spread for 12 months. This year's outbreaks, some of them interconnected, started five months ago in undervaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people have died — two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico — and dozens of people have been hospitalized. Public health experts maintain the true case count may be higher than state health departments have confirmed. North America has three other major measles outbreaks, with 2,966 cases in Chihuahua state, Mexico, 2,223 cases in Ontario, Canada and 1,230 in Alberta, Canada. Thirteen other states have current confirmed outbreaks of three or more people — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah — and four other states saw their outbreaks end. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles after two doses. The World Health Organization said in 2000 that measles had been eliminated from the U.S. The CDC identified 22 outbreaks in 2019, the largest being two separate clusters in New York — 412 in New York state and 702 in New York City. These were linked because as measles was spreading through close-knit Orthodox Jewish communities, the CDC said. It's a similar situation in North America this year, where the Canada, Mexico and Texas outbreaks stem from large Mennonite communities in the regions. Mennonite churches do not formally discourage vaccination, though more conservative Mennonite communities historically have low vaccination rates and a distrust of government. A recent study found childhood vaccination rates against measles fell after the COVID-19 pandemic in nearly 80% of the more than 2,000 U.S. counties with available data, including in states that are battling outbreaks this year. Only 92.7% of kindergarteners in the U.S. had the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 2023-2024 school year, below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the Texas outbreak, only 82% of kindergarteners were up-to-date with MMR vaccines. State and federal leaders have for years kept funding stagnant for local public health departments' vaccination programs that are tasked with reversing the trend. 'What we're seeing with measles is a little bit of a 'canary in a coal mine,'" said Lauren Gardner, leader of Johns Hopkins University's independent measles and COVID tracking databases. "It's indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this county and just, I think, likely to get worse.' © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Los Angeles Times
09-07-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
The U.S. is having its worst year for measles in more than three decades
The U.S. is having its worst year for measles spread in more than three decades, with a total of 1,288 cases nationally and another six months to go in 2025. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that the national case count surpassed 2019, when there were 1,274 cases for the year and the country almost lost its status of having eliminated the vaccine-preventable illness. That could happen this year if the virus has nonstop spread for 12 months. This year's outbreaks, some of them interconnected, started five months ago in undervaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people have died — two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico — and dozens of people have been hospitalized. Public health experts maintain the true case count may be higher than state health departments have confirmed. North America has three other major measles outbreaks, with 2,966 cases in Chihuahua state, Mexico, 2,223 cases in Ontario, Canada and 1,230 in Alberta, Canada. Twelve other states have current confirmed outbreaks of three or more people — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah — and four other states saw their outbreaks end. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles after two doses. The World Health Organization said in 2000 that measles had been eliminated from the U.S. The CDC identified 22 outbreaks in 2019, the largest being two separate clusters in New York — 412 in New York state and 702 in New York City. These were linked because as measles was spreading through close-knit Orthodox Jewish communities, the CDC said. It's a similar situation in North America this year, where the Canada, Mexico and Texas outbreaks stem from large Mennonite communities in the regions. Mennonite churches do not formally discourage vaccination, though more conservative Mennonite communities historically have low vaccination rates and a distrust of government. A recent study found childhood vaccination rates against measles fell after the COVID-19 pandemic in nearly 80% of the more than 2,000 U.S. counties with available data, including in states that are battling outbreaks this year. Only 92.7% of kindergarteners in the U.S. had the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 2023-2024 school year, below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the Texas outbreak, only 82% of kindergarteners were up-to-date with MMR vaccines. State and federal leaders have for years kept funding stagnant for local public health departments' vaccination programs that are tasked with reversing the trend. 'What we're seeing with measles is a little bit of a 'canary in a coal mine,'' said Lauren Gardner, leader of Johns Hopkins University's independent measles and COVID tracking databases. 'It's indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this county and just, I think, likely to get worse.' Shastri writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.


CNBC
09-07-2025
- Health
- CNBC
The U.S. is having its worst year for measles in more than three decades
The U.S. is having its worst year for measles spread in more than three decades, with a total of 1,288 cases nationally and another six months to go in 2025. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that the national case count surpassed 2019, when there were 1,274 cases for the year and the country almost lost its status of having eliminated the vaccine-preventable illness. That could happen this year if the virus has nonstop spread for 12 months. This year's outbreaks, some of them interconnected, started five months ago in undervaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people have died — two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico — and dozens of people have been hospitalized. Public health experts maintain the true case count may be higher than state health departments have confirmed. North America has three other major measles outbreaks, with 2,966 cases in Chihuahua state, Mexico, 2,223 cases in Ontario, Canada and 1,230 in Alberta, Canada. Twelve other states have current confirmed outbreaks of three or more people -Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah — and four other states saw their outbreaks end. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles after two doses. The World Health Organization said in 2000 that measles had been eliminated from the U.S. The CDC identified 22 outbreaks in 2019, the largest being two separate clusters in New York — 412 in New York state and 702 in New York City. These were linked because as measles was spreading through close-knit Orthodox Jewish communities, the CDC said. It's a similar situation in North America this year, where the Canada, Mexico and Texas outbreaks stem from large Mennonite communities in the regions. Mennonite churches do not formally discourage vaccination, though more conservative Mennonite communities historically have low vaccination rates and a distrust of government. A recent study found childhood vaccination rates against measles fell after the Covid-19 pandemic in nearly 80% of the more than 2,000 U.S. counties with available data, including in states that are battling outbreaks this year. Only 92.7% of kindergarteners in the U.S. had the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 2023-2024 school year, below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the Texas outbreak, only 82% of kindergarteners were up-to-date with MMR vaccines. State and federal leaders have for years kept funding stagnant for local public health departments' vaccination programs that are tasked with reversing the trend. "What we're seeing with measles is a little bit of a 'canary in a coal mine,'" said Lauren Gardner, leader of Johns Hopkins University's independent measles and Covid tracking databases. "It's indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this county and just, I think, likely to get worse."