London Olympics 2012 may spark measle outbreak, US warns

That compares to an annual tally of 214 measles cases in the US in 2011,
including three infants too young to be vaccinated who caught the disease in
a California doctor’s waiting room from a seven-year-old who had
visited Switzerland.

Experts said that in recent years America had typically experienced only 50
cases a year, and blamed visitors to Europe for the increase.

Greg Wallace, a measles specialist with the CDC’s division of viral diseases,
said: “We usually have about 50 cases a year, but last year we had a
record number of importations.”

Each measles case costs an estimated $160,000 (£101,000) to treat in the
United States’ healthcare system. Around one in three of those infected
with the disease will require hospital treatment.

Before vaccination was routine, the virus killed between 3,000 and 5,000
Americans a year.

The CDC blamed the 1998 British autism scare, when parents became wary of
vaccinating their children with the combined measles, mumps and rubella
injection because of false claims that the jabs were linked to learning
difficulties, for higher rates of measles in the UK compared to the US.

The claims, made by a team led by Andrew Wakefield in a paper published in the
Lancet, were retracted in 2010 after it emerged that they had been based on
faked research.

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