Miriam thought her niece was safe from measles.
At five months
old, the baby girl was too young for the first of the two MMR (measles,
mumps and rubella) vaccines recommended by the CDC. Miriam knew about
the measles outbreak that had plagued her community, a Hasidic enclave
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since last fall.
Since December,
however, religious day schools in the area had been ordered by New
York’s Department of Health to bar unvaccinated students from attending
in an effort to keep the outbreak under control. Miriam and her sister
assumed the five-month-old would be safe at her daycare, which shares
space with a school.
They were wrong. Within days, the baby came
down with a fever. By Sunday, the baby had a head-to-toe rash. For most
of last week, she had a hacking cough, a runny nose, and other flu-like
symptoms. “You feel really helpless when a five-month-old is sick,”
Miriam said. “That’s why it was so scary.”
Miriam’s niece was not
the only child affected. Last Thursday, the Department of Health
identified 25 more cases of measles in the borough’s Orthodox Jewish
community; the total number of cases now stands at 158 since the
outbreak began in October.
And while many religious day schools,
called yeshivas, are believed to be complying with the Health
Department’s rules on unvaccinated students, at least six have not. One
of them, Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov Pupa in Williamsburg, is linked to at
least 42 cases of measles after allowing an unvaccinated student with
measles to attend classes
The rise of anti-vaxxing may be partly
to blame for the recent surge in measles cases. “People don’t think
measles is a big deal,” Miriam said. “We didn’t know how bad it is.”
“What’s wrong with measles?” one mother, who declined to give her name, told The Daily Beast.
“It’s a childhood disease. It passes you by.” She added that more and
more mothers in the community were concerned about the negative effects
of vaccines. Read more details about it here.
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