Tarrant County is one of 25 counties across the country that has been identified to be most at risk for a measles outbreak.
According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Johns Hopkins University, more than 700 confirmed measles cases in 22 states were reported since January 2019.
That is nearly double the amount last year and it's the highest number reported since the virus was eradicated in the United States in 2000.
In an article written by UT News, Sahotra Sarkar, the study's lead author, said deaths caused by measles would only increase.
"For measles, most experts believe that there will be one to two deaths per 1,000 cases, most likely infants. We are set to see over 1,000 cases in the U.S. in 2019. So, for the first time since the 1980s, we may expect infant deaths from measles in the U.S.," said Sarkar, a philosophy and integrative biology professor at UT Austin. "We have long known that vaccine avoidance is a critical public health issue in the U.S. and Europe. Our results show how travel from regions elsewhere compounds this risk."
According to the research, the most high risk areas are those near international airports such as Travis County, Honolulu County, Salt Lake County and multiple counties in Florida.
"Critically, we recommend that public health officials and policymakers prioritize monitoring the counties we identify to be at high risk that have not yet reported cases, especially those that lie adjacent to counties with ongoing outbreaks and those that house large international airports," said Lauren Gardner, an associate professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins and a UT Austin engineering alumna.
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"The vaccine avoidance problem is not limited to measles. Pertussis — whooping cough — is another disease making a comeback because of dropping vaccination rates, and we predict serious outbreaks in the U.S. in the near future," Sarkar said. "Policymakers must focus on centers of vaccination refusal as well as regions with a lot of passenger inflow from affected countries worldwide if there are even small local pockets of unvaccinated people."
