INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana is battling its second measles outbreak in two years, even though its vaccination rate exceeds the national average. Health officials say the cases, traced to a Super Bowl event, illustrate just how vulnerable the public is to exposure from sources at home and abroad.
The 13 cases confirmed this month by state health officials have been confined to two counties, Boone and Hamilton. But all cases are linked to two infected people who visited the Super Bowl Village together on Feb. 3, prompting Indiana officials to reach out to health departments in New York and Massachusetts – home of the participating New England Patriots and New York Giants – for fear that the outbreak could spread across state lines.
Concerns about a widespread outbreak are well-founded, said University of Minnesota professor Kristen Ehresmann, who was part of a research team that studied the disease’s spread across a large sporting event.
In 1991, a track and field runner from Argentina participating in the Special Olympics in Minneapolis unknowingly started an outbreak of measles, infecting spectators, athletes and event organizers.
“This was kind of Murphy’s Law of disease transmission, with a highly infectious disease in a very, very crowded place so as to spread the disease as much as possible,” Ehresmann said.
The Super Bowl setting has the same potential to spread the infectious disease, even though health officials in 2000 declared endemic measles – cases of the disease that originated in the United States – to be eliminated, largely because of increasing vaccination rates.
About 90 percent of all Americans are vaccinated against measles, said Dr. Greg Wallace of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Indiana, more than 92 percent of children ages 19 months to 35 months received the vaccine in 2010, officials said.
But concerns over the vaccine’s safety – refuted by researchers as unfounded – have led some parents to decide against immunizing their children. A 2005 outbreak of 34 measles cases in Indiana was traced back to a group of parents who didn’t vaccinate their children, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The U.S. typically sees about 50 cases of measles each year. But there were 223 cases in 2011 – a 15-year high.
Indiana’s outbreak has prompted state health officials to issue near-daily updates on the number of cases and places visited by those infected in hopes of stopping the disease’s spread.
Ehresmann hopes the outbreak reminds people that measles are dangerous and contagious.
“You never know when it’s possible to have an exposure,” she said. “Who would think the Super Bowl would have any link or tie to the measles?”
