Tag: herd immunity

Pathologist Says ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Threatened in Measles Outbreak

Spending time with other people is a cure for loneliness. But being a member of a vaccinated community has an important added benefit: preventing the spread of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases such as preventing a measles outbreak. The current concern over outbreaks of measles in the United States provides valuable lessons about how vaccinations are effective Gary W. Procop, MD, FCAP, chairs the CAP Microbiology Resource Committee and specializes...

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App for Simulating the Potential Spread of the Measles Virus

To help the public better understand how measles can spread, a team of infectious disease computer modelers at the University of Pittsburgh has launched a free, mobile-friendly tool that lets users simulate measles outbreaks in cities across the country. The tool is part of the Pitt team’s Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics, or FRED, that it previously developed to simulate flu epidemics. FRED is based on anonymized U.S. census...

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Contagion: How One Person Can Set Off a Measles Outbreak

Americans may be victims of their own success when it comes to the eradication of infectious diseases and take their disease-free lives for granted, says Jorge Parada, MD, hospital epidemiologist and medical director of the Infection Prevention and Control program at Loyola University Health System. “There are plenty of countries in the world where measles and chicken pox are very commonplace; I have served in Angola where mothers begged...

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