Wonderful, an awesome victory for anti-vaxxers!
Measles is contagious before symptoms appear, and it is transmitted through the air. It remains airborne for up to 2 hours after a contagious person has been in the area, and it can transmit to people who are physically distant from the ill person.
Measles has a chance—about 1 in 300-500—of killing during the course of the illness, and another ~1 in 10,000 chance of killing between 7 to 10 years after the illness. It can also leave survivors deaf or mentally disabled. The death rate would be higher, but we have very good medical care, so the 1 in 5 who end up hospitalized because of measles usually survive, where they would have died before the advent of modern evidence-based-medicine. Measles has a very high death rate in countries without modern medicine.
In addition to the direct consequences of measles, recent research has shown that measles doubles the rate of death from all infectious disease for approximately 2 years after recovery from measles. When measles vaccination programs were implemented, public health officials noticed that the death rate from all infectious disease dropped by about half, but only recently have researchers begun to systematically explore why and started to come up with answers. Measles suppresses the immune system. Not only that, but it erases existing immunities to diseases. So, even if a child has been fully immunized against every other vaccine preventable disease, those immunizations are all negated if that child catches measles.
Isn’t measles great? /s
The thing is, measles is one of the handful of diseases that is possible to eliminate, forever. That is because measles does not infect animals, so when it is eliminated from people, it is gone forever. We can achieve this by immunizing everyone until there are no longer non-immune people to host the virus. And then no one will ever need to receive measles vaccine again.
Rinderpest is a related virus that used to infect animals. Through a diligent vaccination and surveillance program, the last case of Rinderpest occurred in 2001, and in 2011, the disease was officially declared eradicated.
/jump off soapbox
For all we know, it was brought in by an illegal alien. There seem to be a lot of those running around of late.
That would require a border where everyones medical records were checked and confirmed.