The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says parents’ refusal to vaccinate their children against measles has helped drive U.S. cases of the potentially life-threatening illness to their worst levels in a dozen years.
In 2008, 131 measles cases have been reported, 15 of them serious enough that patients had to be hospitalized. Four of those patients were younger than 15 years of age. No one died.
More than 90 percent of the patients were not vaccinated, had no evidence of having been vaccinated, or were babies too young to have been vaccinated, the CDC says.
Thirteen percent of the measles cases were imported from countries that included Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, India, Israel, China, Germany, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Russia. The CDC says that’s the lowest percentage of imported measles since 1996.
