After months of exceptional measures, New York City announced Tuesday, September 3, 2019 the end of the measles epidemic that has affected 654 people since October 2018, the worst recurrence of this disease in the American metropolis in nearly three decades. The official end of the epidemic, after 42 days without new contamination, comes just before the start of the school year, on September 5, in the American financial capital.
The affected neighborhoods were located in Brooklyn, and more precisely in Williamsburg – especially among the Orthodox Jewish community -, where the town hall had made vaccination mandatory on April 9, 2018 to stem the epidemic. Several schools had been occasionally closed, failing to exclude unimmunized children.
“The fight against the denial of science continues”
New York State removed religious exemptions that parents could invoke to circumvent school vaccination obligations in mid-June 2019. Only a duly certified medical reason can now avoid vaccination, to avoid exemptions “pretexts“in a context of growing mistrust of vaccines.
“As schools set to reopen this week, we must remain vigilant. To protect our children and our neighborhoods, I call on all New Yorkers to get vaccinated“, said Mayor Bill de Blasio in a statement.”The fight against denial of science continues“said Mark Levine, chairman of the city council’s health committee.
Free vaccination
Free vaccination, information campaigns available in Yiddish or Spanish to counter “anti-vaccine propaganda“: the city has spent more than six million dollars and mobilized more than 500 employees in the face of this epidemic which arrived with travelers from Israel, according to the statement. An area of the New York suburbs, the county of Rockland, with a large Orthodox Jewish population, it is still fighting a strong epidemic: some 312 people had been infected there at the end of August.
The United States, like many countries, including Europe, is experiencing a resurgence of this disease with potentially fatal complications. Between January 1 and August 29, 2019, some 1,234 cases were identified in 31 US states, the highest number since 1992, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The World Health Organization last week recorded 89,994 cases of measles in 48 European countries in the first half of 2019, more than double compared to the same period of 2018 and more than for the whole of 2018, with a high concentration cases in countries of the former USSR.
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