What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
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Why is the resurgence of measles a public health concern?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Last week, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has historically been a vaccine skeptic, as President Trump's head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Today, we're going to be talking about the importance of vaccines amid the growing avian bird flu and measles spread with pediatrician and infectious disease expert Dr. Adam Ratner. Twenty-five years ago, measles was declared eliminated in the United States. It was a long-fought win for pediatricians and researchers and those who work in infectious diseases. Today, however, measles is back, and Dr. Ratner says the resurgence points to a larger, more significant problem for public health. Measles isn't just inconvenient.
It is highly contagious and can lead to serious complications, including pneumonia, brain inflammation, blindness, and even death. Dr. Ratner's new book, Booster Shots, The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health, warns that as the number of vaccinations in children decreases and the lack of public trust in science increases, the resurgence of illnesses like measles is a foregone conclusion. Measles, like many communicable diseases, Ratner says, is a biological agent that preys on human inequity, thriving on conditions of chaos, colonialism, and war. Dr. Adam Ratner is a professor of pediatrics and microbiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Hassenfield Children's Hospital and Bellevue Hospital Center.
We recorded this conversation last week. Dr. Ratner, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thanks so much. Delighted to be here.
Well, your book is very relevant. President Trump has announced significant funding cuts for the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, which will have a direct impact on medical research. The anti-vax movement continues to grow. There is still this disbelief in science and research that we are seeing. And you have made it your life's work to study and treat infectious diseases. Why did you want to tell the larger implications of what we're seeing through this story of measles?
When I first started writing the book, the question that I got most often was, why measles? Because I think a lot of people I talked to thought of measles as a solved problem. And really, so did I. And that's... kind of the encapsulation of the measles story put very simply in the sense that measles thrives on being underestimated. So all throughout my training, I learned to take care of children with all sorts of diseases. And then as I focused on infectious diseases, I learned to take care of kids with complicated infections and sometimes with unusual infections. And Measles was something that in my mind had been filed under solved problems. It was a thing that we had had a vaccine for since the mid-1960s and that we very, very rarely saw. I saw a handful of cases in my training. And then in 2018 and 2019, we had a huge measles outbreak in New York City with about 650 cases and some kids who were very, very sick. I took care of children in intensive care units due to complications of measles. And
That was the point at which I dug deeper into the measles story and I realized that there was so much here that people don't think about and that when we start to see measles, it's evidence of faltering of our public health systems and of fomenting of distrust of vaccines and that measles outbreaks and measles cases are so much more than just the rash that you see.
Right. I talked about how confidence in medicine and public health may actually be at an all-time low, which is very interesting because the pandemic showed us how infectious disease spreads. We watched a vaccine be developed, and we also saw all of the inequities that a crisis like that revealed about who has access to medical care and vaccinations. I assume this is also what keeps you up at night as you think about measles being an indicator.
Absolutely. I mean, I think the the pandemic, we all experienced together, but we each experienced in kind of a different way. The way that I experienced it was in the hospital, taking care of children with COVID and some children who were very sick from it. And also, of course, in my home life, worried about my wife, worried about my daughter, worried about my parents. And
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