Well, just when you thought the Alabama Supreme Court had won the week’s prize for bad biological science… Florida decides to deny three quarters of a century of learnings, about viral pandemics.

And it does so with the explicit blessing of Gov. Ron DeSantis (proving that at least some legacy admissions at Yale… are a wasted use of a scarce resource — an elite education). The WaPo has it all — but it sure feels like a bad sci-fi / biblical nonsense movie — not the current Broward County Public School system:

…As a Florida elementary school tries to contain a growing measles outbreak, the state’s top health official is giving advice that runs counter to science and may leave unvaccinated children at risk of contracting one of the most contagious pathogens on Earth, clinicians and public health experts said.

Florida surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo failed to urge parents to vaccinate their children or keep unvaccinated students home from school as a precaution in a letter to parents at the Fort Lauderdale-area school this week following six confirmed measles cases.

Instead of following what he acknowledged was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles — Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”

Ben Hoffman, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said Florida’s guidance flies in the face of long-standing and widely accepted public health guidance for measles, which can result in severe complications, including death….

“It runs counter to everything I have ever heard and everything that I have read,” Hoffman said. “It runs counter to our policy. It runs counter to what the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] would recommend.”

Measles outbreaks have been on the rise in recent years. So far in 2024, at least 26 cases in at least 12 states have been reported to the CDC, about double the number at this point last year. In addition to the six cases confirmed in the Florida school, cases have been reported in Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York City, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Because measles virus particles can linger in the air and on surfaces for up to two hours after an infected person leaves the area, up to 90 percent of people without immunity will contract measles if exposed. People who have been infected or received the full two doses of the MMR vaccine are 98 percent protected and very unlikely to contract the disease. That is why public health officials typically advocate for vaccination amid outbreaks….

Ladapo’s unwillingness to use public health tools echoes the movement by conservative and libertarian forces to defang public health’s ability to contain diseases like the highly infectious measles. In a measles outbreak in Ohio that began in late 2022, most of the 85 children infected were old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said. The state legislature in 2021 had stripped health officials’ abilities to order someone suspected of having an infectious disease to quarantine.

Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said Ladapo’s failure to urge vaccination endangers children.

“Is he trying to prove that measles isn’t a contagious disease when the data are clear that it is the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, far more contagious than influenza or covid?” Offit wrote in an email….

A drop below 95 percent vaccination coverage for measles can compromise herd immunity and allow a virus to spread more quickly. Florida’s state vaccination coverage is 90.6 percent, but statewide vaccination coverage does not identify pockets where there may be lower coverage.

The outbreak will explode exponentially, becoming a much bigger community threat, if unvaccinated people exposed to the virus don’t follow public health recommendations and stay home from school during the potentially contagious period, said Patsy Stinchfield, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a nurse practitioner in Minneapolis. She has been involved in controlling three measles outbreaks, including the 2017 outbreak in Minnesota that affected 75 people, most of them unvaccinated, and most of them children….

Manatee Bay Elementary School, about 20 miles west of Fort Lauderdale, has six confirmed measles cases, school officials said this week. Of the school’s 1,067 students, 33 have not received the MMR vaccine, Broward County Schools Superintendent Peter B. Licata said Wednesday during a school board meeting. A school district official said the district has held “four vaccination opportunities,” including two at the school and two at other locations in the community….

What on Earth is happening… to common sense, in these GOP dominated (mostly southern) geographies? Good grief. On this day in 1954, the first mass polio vaccine campaign was launched in Pittsburgh — and that was the beginning of a scourge — eradicated. These people are… luddites.

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