"On Sunday, public health officials in two Michigan counties warned their residents that they may have been exposed to measles. In Wayne County, an adult who had contracted the virus abroad had been in health-related settings in Dearborn on two days last week — two urgent care clinics, a CVS pharmacy, and a hospital emergency department. Health officials in neighboring Washtenaw County issued a similar alert about a different case — also an adult, also infected abroad — who was in the emergency department of a hospital in Ypsilanti on March 1.
"Both counties urged unvaccinated people who had been in the listed locations at the listed times to contact public health or their health care provider, warning them to phone ahead if they needed to seek in-person care.
"These kinds of notices are standard public health practice during measles outbreaks. Alerts of this sort may also warn that someone with measles had been in a crowded public location — an airport, a shopping mall, a theme park.
"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.”
"Michael Mina, an infectious diseases epidemiologist who has studied measles extensively, said the state’s approach defies common sense.
“What’s happening in Florida is sort of breaking all the global conventions around measles,” said Mina, who formerly taught at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “One of the first things that anyone would normally do, whether it be in Europe or the United States, is be extremely — almost overly — transparent.”
“They very well might get lucky. The outbreaks might subside. But if it’s not now, it’s next time,” Mina said, warning that if Florida mishandles its cases, other states could suffer. “It can light fires across the whole country.”
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Why would you deliberately choose to NOT protect people from contagious diseases? I think that anti-vaxxer "Surgeon General" Ladapo is deliberately trying to prevent people from vaccinating their kids.
Imagine what's going to happen if the kids who come to Florida for Spring Break end up catching and spreading measles!
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