Measles is back. Blame the anti-vaxxers.

In the year 2000, the CDC announced that measles had been eliminated from the U.S. This was a fantastic public health achievement, made possible by the measles vaccine, which is 99% effective and which has virtually no side effects.

Unfortunately, measles is back. Just last week, the CDC announced that we've had at least 695 cases this year, the most since 2000, primarily from 3 large outbreaks, one in the state of Washington and two in New York. Because the CDC's surveillance is far from perfect, the true number of measles cases is likely much higher. And we're only four months into the year.

Also this week, UCLA and CalState-LA had to quarantine over 700 students and staff members who were exposed to measles from an outbreak in the Los Angeles area. At UCLA, one student who had measles attended multiple classes while still contagious, exposing hundreds of others to the highly contagious virus, according to a message from the university's chancellor.

No one has died as of yet, but if we don't quash these outbreaks, it's only a matter of time before someone will die. Measles has a fatality rate of 0.2%, or 2 deaths per thousand cases. That may sound small, but it's truly frightening when you consider that the U.S. had an estimated 500,000 cases per year before the vaccine was introduced in 1963.

Given the risks of measles, and given the remarkable effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, why don't people vaccinate their children? The primary reason is simple: it's the highly vocal, supremely confident, and utterly misinformed anti-vaccine movement. Anti-vaxxers spread their message daily on Facebook, Twitter, websites, and other media outlets. (I will not link to any of them here because I don't want to increase their influence.) They have launched systematic efforts throughout the U.S. and in other countries to convince parents not to vaccinate their children, claiming that vaccines cause a variety of harms, none of which are correct. (I won't list those here either, because even mentioning them gives the claims credibility.)

In one of the two outbreaks in New York, anti-vaxxers distributed highly misleading pamphlets in an effort to convince parents in an ultra-religious Jewish community not to vaccinate their kids. The anonymously-published pamphlet was "filled with wild conspiracy theories and inaccurate data," but it seems to have worked, as least among some of the parents.

The anti-vax movement is also behind the state-by-state effort to allow parents to opt out of vaccinations for their children in public schools. We're finally seeing some states roll this back, but it is still far too easy for parents to claim an "ethical" or "religious" exemption, allowing them to put their unvaccinated kids in school and thereby expose countless other children to measles and other preventable diseases. (I put those words in quotes because there is no valid ethical or religious objection to vaccines. All major religions strongly support vaccination.) Anti-vax websites provide how-to instructions telling parents how to get exemptions for their kids, and a small number of anti-vax doctors (I'm looking at you, Bob Sears) readily dispense large numbers of anti-vax exemptions. This needs to end.

The modern anti-vaccine movement started in 1998, with a fraudulent paper about the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, published by a former doctor who lost his medical license after the fraud was revealed. The lead author was eventually revealed to have taken large sums of money (unbeknownst to his co-authors) from lawyers who were trying to build a case to sue vaccine makers. That same ex-doctor, who I also won't name here (his initials are AW), is now a hero to the anti-vax movement, and he travels the world spreading his toxic message. He's even made an anti-vax movie.

I sincerely hope we won't see any children die before the anti-vaccine movement finally goes away. For any parents who are thinking that they won't vaccinate their kids, I urge them to read the heartbreaking words of Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and many other wonderful books), whose oldest daughter Olivia died of measles in 1962, at the age of seven:

"...one morning, when [Olivia] was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.

'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.

'I feel all sleepy,' she said.In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her." 

The measles vaccine was a miracle of modern medicine, and it's been administered safely to hundreds of millions of people. Measles is a dangerous illness, but we can prevent it. No parent should have to go through what Roald Dahl went through.