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But in Florida, where 10 residents and at least
four non-residents have been diagnosed with measles in the past month or so, the Department of Health has released scant information about those cases. The seeming reticence to speak openly about measles leaves in the dark anyone in the public who might be concerned about whether they may have had an exposure. Likewise, people considering vacations to Florida who want to avoid measles exposures have almost no information on which to plan their trips.
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Public health experts elsewhere see all this as of a piece and worry that the state’s approach could fuel spread of the virus. Part of that approach involved Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, telling parents of unvaccinated children that they
could choose whether to send their kids to school or not during the ongoing outbreak at Manatee Bay Elementary — a move that has drawn widespread criticism within the public health sphere.
“Very little information is available,” Scott Rivkees, Florida’s former surgeon general, told STAT by email, adding it is “very unusual to have such sparse information for the public, especially when the onus is being put on parents to make decisions.”
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Giving people the information with which to make decisions like that is an important part of containing measles, said William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It is very important for public health officials to be very proactive about one, promoting vaccination, which we’re not seeing in Florida, and …. two, in the event of a potential exposure, to make people aware of that, so that individuals have an opportunity to protect themselves and their children,” he said.
Informing the public of sites where measles exposures could have taken place is especially critical when it comes to events in health care settings, which have the capacity to turbocharge both the size of an outbreak and the amount of work that curtailing it will entail.
When people infected with measles visit doctors offices, clinics, or hospitals, they can expose large numbers of people to the highly contagious virus. Some of those people may be infants too young to be vaccinated; the first shot in the two-dose measles regimen is given at between 12 and 15 months. Some may be people who are immunocompromised. Some may be among the rare group of vaccinated people for whom the vaccine didn’t induce protection.
