New Delhi, April 24 The US may be on the brink of a major measles resurgence as vaccination rates continue to fall across several states, according to a new study.
A team of US-based researchers from the universities of Stanford, Baylor, Rice, and Texas used a simulation model to assess the importation and dynamic spread of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases across 50 states in the country, Xinhua news agency reported.
The model evaluated scenarios with different vaccination rates over 25 years.
At current vaccination levels, the model projects that measles could regain endemic status in the US, potentially resulting in approximately 851,300 cases over the next 25 years, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
If vaccination rates were to decline by 10 per cent, the study estimates the country could see 11.1 million measles cases over the same period.
A more severe drop of 50 per cent could lead to 51.2 million measles cases, alongside 9.9 million rubella cases, 4.3 million cases of poliomyelitis, 197 diphtheria cases, 10.3 million hospitalisations, and 159,200 deaths.
The study comes amid declining vaccination rates in the US, which began at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic because of many factors, which include policy (for example, increased use of personal belief exemptions to childhood vaccine schedules), misinformation, distrust, and other societal and person-level factors. In addition, there are now ongoing policy debates aimed at reducing the childhood vaccine schedule.
This increasing antivaccine sentiment has also coincided with an increase in the number of outbreaks and cases of vaccine-preventable diseases in the US. Since 2024, there has been an increase in the number of measles outbreaks (including a large outbreak that emerged in West Texas), with a significant number of paediatric hospitalisations.
The new findings support the need to continue routine childhood vaccination at high coverage to prevent a resurgence of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases in the country.
“At current state-level vaccination rates, measles may become endemic again; increasing vaccine coverage would prevent this,” said the researchers.
“Based on estimates from this modeling study, declining childhood vaccination rates will increase the frequency and size of outbreaks of previously eliminated vaccine-preventable infections, eventually leading to their return to endemic levels,” the researchers said.
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