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Measles on My Mind
Today, less than three months before I give birth, the United States hit a milestone: We are officially in the middle of the worst measles outbreak in the country since the vaccine eliminated the disease almost twenty years ago. We have had more cases in 2019 than we had in all of 2018, and we’re only 1/4 of the way through the year.
The outbreak has had a few epicenters, namely progressive “crunchy” communities in Seattle, Brooklyn, etc and in ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclaves. As a Jew, the latter is deeply embarrassing. Rabbis from across the ideological spectrum agree on next-to-nothing, and yet, almost all have come out in support of vaccinations. The families refusing vaccinations number a few, but when families have half a dozen or a dozen children and live in a small, tight-knit community, the conditions are ripe for an outbreak, and that’s what we’ve had.
In nearby (to me) Baltimore, there have been a few exposures over the last several weeks, namely, a pediatrician’s office popular with Orthodox Jewish families and two kosher supermarkets. With the holiday of Passover this week, families are traveling a great deal, and public health experts I’ve spoken with anticipate the outbreak (especially within Jewish communities) will only grow.
Several weeks ago, I penned a piece in the New York Times about how nerve-wracking the lack of vaccinations is in another community I’m active in: among homeschoolers. And so, imagine my surprise when last night, at a Passover program, another mother mentioned to me that she asked my daughter if she was vaccinated after my daughter informed her that she is homeschooled. The other mother explained to me that she recently read a piece in the Times about the anti-vaccine tendencies among homeschoolers and wanted to make sure her daughter was safe playing with mine. (Funnily enough, she had no idea I had written that Times op-ed.)
She asked my daughter “when you go to the doctor, do you get shots?” Parenting in the age of measles is becoming a mine-field. Was it appropriate to ask my daughter? Should she have asked me instead? If so, how? These are questions I find myself asking, especially in the leadup to having a baby who won’t be able to get vaccinated for at least her first six months of life.
On the Today Show blog yesterday, the issue of what and how to ask other parents was discussed also. They write,
Once measles was confirmed in King County, Hoerster chatted with a pediatrician friend and came up with an interesting, if awkward, way to keep her daughter safe until she could get her first MMR shotat 12 months.
After scheduling each play date for her 2-year-old son, Hoerster would follow up with a short text message to the parents.
It explained that, during the outbreak, Hoerster and her husband were choosing to limit their exposure to unvaccinated people while their daughter was still an infant.
“I ended up using text versus other means because it felt a little less invasive,” Hoerster said. “So people would have time to think about how they would want to respond, including if they weren’t vaccinated and wanted to find an alternative explanation for why they couldn’t hang out.”
They go on to write,
Five years ago, Alisson, a 41-year-old mother of two, was on maternity leave with her second child when Washington had a different measles scare in 2014. Alisson, who requested her last name not be used, lived in Bellingham when a person with the virus exposed potentially thousands of people to the illness in Lynden, a town 30 minutes away.
Her husband, a physician, asked her to consider staying home until the risk was declared over. She agreed with the decision, but was angry about it for a long time.
“It was so frustrating to lose two weeks of my life sitting at home,” she recalled. “But it was better than the alternative — continuing to live my life and lose my child because he got measles and died from it.”
Less than three months out from my due date, I’ve been making these calculations as well. I won’t go to synagogue or grocery shopping at Kosher supermarkets until my daughter is old enough for her MMR shot. While my synagogue has made clear that non-vaccinating families are not welcome, the recent cases of exposure in Baltimore were due to a baby too young to be vaccinated; he had been exposed by a non-vaccinating family and didn’t appear symptomatic for days, going grocery shopping with his mother as babies do. We will avoid the community pool and playground frequented by the Jewish community as well. The measles outbreak makes me feel like an anti-Semite, but I don’t know what other choices there are. As I discussed in my Times op-ed, I was already planning on eschewing several homeschool activities due to the outbreak.
It seems that we’ll be carefully choosing our playmates until the end of the winter. For me, the million-dollar question is: how does one go about choosing these playmates (i.e. asking about the vaccination status) without offending?
Published in Culture
I wouldn’t worry about it. Just ask people. This is not a problem. It’s our job as parents to protect our children. Why would anyone be offended by such a question? If people are so dumb as to be offended, I’m not sure your child would be safe near them anyway. :-)
If a child cannot be vaccinated for some reason, his or her parents need to take special precautions. Other people respect that. This is not a politeness issue in any way.
There was a particularly virulent viral strain of pneumonia going around when my son was born. My pediatrician told me to avoid any spaces with closed air systems such as grocery stores and the mall and any crowded spaces for six months. Frankly, I’m not sure that’s bad advice for any new baby. I have a feeling my germophobe Italian mother-in-law would have automatically kept her babies away from people of all kinds and especially groups and crowds.
That said, a convincing argument for breastfeeding used to be that the baby would continue to get some immunity from the mother. There was a lot of concentrated immunity passed along also in the “colostrum” as I recall–the first breast milk. I’m surprised that the baby isn’t protected from measles and rubella by that immunity for the first six months at least, while he or she is breastfeeding.
Just ask the question. “Hey is your kid vaccinated?” If they take offense you don’t want your kid around them period.
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We live in Baltimore, and just ask: “Are your kids up to date with their shots?”
If the answer is not a “yes” then they are not welcome. I can tell you that because of the general blend of Homeschooling with Crunchy, there are far too many unvaccinated people.
Our doctor tells us that only 30% of her patients show as having measles immunity using the standard test. Most were vaccinated, but there is a reason we need herd immunity!
Drive on, Miz Bethany. You got the right idea and operational template.
That’s all I got, otherwise I’d start editorializing in a rabid kind of way that would be non-CoC compliant.
When I was a med student in 1981 we were all rounded up to see a kid from Cambodia with measles. “Take a good look, you will probably never see this again in your career…”
We almost had it completely eradicated in the US. Like smallpox. Like TB. Like Syphilis…..
Can a vaccinated kid be exposed to measles and transfer it to a non-vaccinated kid? Maybe you could ask the other parent about vaccination in terms of protecting their child . . .
You can’t leave us hanging like that. Did you tell her it was you?
But not “eliminated.”