Tag: Public Health: Measles

Last fortnight’s news – for the two weeks ending 2025 07 20

Here’s a couple of weeks’ worth of interesting items from the news here in North Texas. No musical accompaniment this time, though we did spend a lot of time today listening to the late, lamented Asylum Street Spankers.

From Dallas:

From Fort Worth:

From Dallas County:

From Tarrant County:

From the suburban cities and towns:

From the suburban counties:

From throughout the North Texas region:

Local editorials and op-eds:

And miscellaneous news (including museums and zoos):

Measles – 2025 05 15

We’re not quite four months into the measles outbreak here in Texas, and according to the state Department of Health and Human Services, we’ve had 717 cases, with 93 hospitalized and two school-aged children dead. Of the 717 people who’ve had measles, 13 have had one dose of measles vaccine and 17 have had two doses, leaving 687 measles patients who failed to take appropriate precautions. If you told me there were people among that 687 who couldn’t take the vaccine, I’d only be madder at the rest who could have and didn’t.

While the bulk of the outbreak is in west Texas and extending into New Mexico, it’s starting to spread. People are contagious up to four days before they get the rash and it’s not like feeling bad ever stopped people from going to work or the store or church or wherever, giving them plenty of ways to spread measles. We have occasional cases in other places, like the recent cases in Tarrant and Denton Counties that aren’t counted as part of the Texas outbreak. But Collin and Rockwall County are on the state’s board, which means they’ve linked those cases back to the west Texas epidemic. It’s only a matter of time until measles is all over the place in the Metroplex.

What kills me is that it didn’t have to be this way. We know there are folks out there who don’t want to vaccinate for religious reasons; we know that’s how the outbreak began. But because we’re now a post-truth society in America, we’re also a post-science and post-vaccine society. My late mother, who would be turning 90 in July if she were still with us, talked to me in the years before her death in 2018 about her experience getting the polio vaccine when it first came out and how grateful she was to have the option of taking the vaccine instead of getting polio (and risking post-polio syndrome). This was because she and her peers knew what it was like to have kids die from childhood diseases. I never thought that Generation X, who lost so many bright lights to AIDS, might turn out to be the lucky ones because most of our parents decided they’d rather we not die of preventable childhood diseases.

(The real problem here isn’t religious exemption; it’s eugenics. People are willing to risk their kids dying instead of risking the theoretical damage–probably imagined to be autism–a vaccine reaction might cause, never considering that childhood diseases don’t just kill but leave permanent, actual damage: blindness, deafness, brain damage, etc.)

It used to be you had to be vaccinated to go to school. I went to private schools as a child, but there was no question of my vaccinations status. Now one of the reasons kids go to private schools is so their parents can avoid vaccination requirements along with everything else about public schools they don’t like, whether it’s naughty books in the library or the presence of people the parents don’t like. The result is a the biggest measles outbreak in a quarter-century and becoming a post-herd immunity society where measles, and other diseases, are endemic. A society where we start seeing those graves with short lifespans again. It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. All we have to do is follow the science and vaccinate ourselves and our kids.

(I don’t want to talk about RFK, Jr. That’s another rant about eugenics.)

Meanwhile, here in Texas, this week the House voted in favor of a bill to allow parents who want vaccine exemptions for their kids to download them from the internet instead of having the state mail the forms. This is because we’re both far behind the times in helping citizens interact with the state and far ahead in enabling parents to ignore public health.

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