A number of advocacy groups and health professionals are calling for another round of measles vaccine shots to be administered to people in order to achieve additional layer of protection from the illness. This is coming on the heels of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people getting infected by measles in California and elsewhere.
About 59 cases of measles have now been reported in California, and a number of these were people that visited Disneyland or work there – however, a number of them were vaccinated. Five out of these measles-infected persons were vaccinated for measles – and four of them were actually vaccinated two or more times – yet they came down with the disease. Five Disneyland workers were also recently diagnosed of measles – yet two of them were immunized against the illness.
“We can expect to see many cases of this vaccine-preventable disease unless people take precautionary measures,” said Dr. Gil Chavez, a California state epidemiologist. “However, cases are now being identified in people who have no links to Disneyland or to these cases,” he added.
Since most of the vaccinated people that still got infected were adults of 20 years and above, health professionals and advocacy groups think adults should be vaccinated again for increased immunity against measles.
“With time, especially if you don’t get natural boosting by being exposed to people with that same illness, your memory cells may tend to forget,” said Dr. Marcelo Laufer, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Miami Children’s Hospital.
Laufer made this assertion on the fact that immunizations against measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough get weaker as decades pass; and people who have been vaccinated against them as children might still contract them as adults – hence the need for repeat doses of vaccinations.
“It may well be important in the future we should give additional doses to adults,” said Dr. James Cherry, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA in Los Angeles. “You get the idea that we’re now way below the level of immunization that we should have,” Cherry added.
The waning defense of vaccines calls for repeat administration when people are getting vulnerable to stains of the illness, mostly against the fact that repeated doses does not harm the body in any way but boost the body’s natural defenses against the disease.
“So we have about 1 in 10 people who are susceptible to measles. Now we have people…who are now 40 years out from vaccination and so some of these people will get measles because their protection has dropped,” said Dr. Cherry.